Gawker: valleywag, ticketmaster

Ticketmaster lays off an estimated 1,000 employees

Owen Thomas — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The layoffs are moving up the food chain, from the startups to the larger tech beasts. FuckedStartups writes that Ticketmaster is laying off 35 percent of its 3,000-plus staff, which squares with other reports I've heard. Ticketmaster is besieged with competition from concert promoter LiveNation, and was recently spun off by IAC. If I had to bet, I'd say these cuts have as much to do with removing the layers of cruft which accumulated under years of flitty mismanagement by IAC CEO Barry Diller as they do with the economy.

IAC down more than half a billion in second quarter

Paul Boutin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:40:00 EDT

In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone Brands, a rollup of catalog companies undermined by weak consumer spending in home and apparel retail. Cornerstone's losses led to a $300 million writedown in goodwill in IAC's second quarter. In addition, the soft real estate market cut revenue for home financing site LendingTree nearly in half.

IAC is moving ahead with plans to spin off four of its divisions by the end of August: HSN (which includes Cornerstone), Ticketmaster, Tree.com (which includes LendingTree), and Interval Leisure Group, which operates vacation sites including ResortQuest Hawaii. That leaves IAC with Ask.com, Match.com and Citysearch. What's happening? Simple: Diller and company have learned that bundling a bunch of diverse online businesses together doesn't create the promised "synergy" of the Web 1.0 boom. Better to let each site fend for itself. Since IAC got rid of Expedia in 2005 (Barry Diller's still chairman of the board), the travel site's ups and downs have closely followed the travel market. That's the watercooler version. You can wonk out with the full details.

Diller's Stepson May Lose His Front-Row Lakers Seats

Nick Denton — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:34:51 EDT

There's one person apart from shareholder John Malone who stands to lose when IAC is broken up: Alex von Furstenberg, adopted son of the internet conglomerate's boss, Barry Diller. The shaved-headed socialite, Diane von Furstenberg's son by her first gay husband, will still inherit a large part of his adoring stepfather's fortune. But after IAC is divided into five, Alex von Furstenberg may have trouble securing the front-row seats at Lakers games that are such a mark of social status in Los Angeles, where von Furstenberg has lived since 2005. He's been relying on Diller's office to cadge tickets to the bastketball games from Ticketmaster, the online ticketing service which IAC is spinning off. The IAC boss will remain chairman of Ticketmaster after the split, but one peons still hopes Diller and his relatives will no longer be able to use the service as a personal favor bank.

I am an employee at Ticketmaster and there is one major reason that we are counting the days until we are spun off from Barry Diller's IAC. Alex von Furstenberg. Barry Diller's stepson demands front row seats to every Laker Game in LA. His request trumphs all other Laker ticket requests from our President, CEO, celebrities, or valuable clients. His sense of entitlement is far worse than people we like to give tix to like Jack Nicholson, and he hasn't even done anything to earn it! What makes it worse is when other Ticketmaster employees look at the court seats we give him (from their nosebleed seats), they are empty because he misses the game! He is the biggest spoilt brat on the West Coast.

What If Websites Were Realistic?

Nick Douglas — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:50:48 EDT

What if Facebook let you properly express your rage against the tool who just added you to the "Buying and Selling Friends" app? What if Netflix knew you'd skip to the dirty bits? I paid Jay Hathaway a slave's wage to draw up what this would look like.

Ticketmaster creates fake Facebook profiles to boost fake popularity

Jackson West — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Ticketmaster, the event-ticket retailer whose monopolies on venues and exorbitant fees are legendarily evil, has somehow garnered nearly 157,000 fans on Facebook. And by "somehow" I mean "created thousands upon thousands of fake accounts." At least that's according to the East Village Idiot, who did some digging and turned up some obvious fakesters, like the hilariously misspelled "Stebe Jobs." Look for Stebe to accumulate thousands of fans of his own as desperate Apple fanboys friend the account to show their undying faith in the real Jobs's techno-cult.

Ticketmaster, NFL in talks to scalp football seats

Jordan Golson — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:49:28 EST

IAC's Ticketmaster division is trying to close a multiyear deal to be the official ticket scalper of the National Football League. TicketMaster competitor and eBay subsidiary StubHub is the other potential bidder for resale rights. Earlier this year, Stubhub made a deal to resell Major League Baseball tickets, a significant blow to Ticketmaster. Unfortunately for Ticketmaster, while the MLB deal gave StubHub resale rights for all 30 teams at once, because of the way the NFL is structured, the league has negotiating rights for only about half the league.

The remaining 15 teams would, if they agreed, be signed up with Ticketmaster over the next five years. Some organizations, including the New England Patriots, ban sales of tickets above face value, making their willingness to join with any reseller questionable. Barry Diller has no such qualms: His IAC, which currently owns Ticketmaster, is considering a spinoff or sale of the property as it looks to break itself up into several different entities. He'd be glad to sell Ticketmaster to the highest bidder.

Ticketmaster teams up with Apple to bribe consumers

Jordan Golson — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:22:46 EST

Apple and Ticketmaster have hooked up for a new promotion. Buyers of concert tickets can get the matching artist's album from the iTunes store for $1 off. Ticketmaster had already offered iTunes affiliate links on its site, which passes a kickback to Ticketmaster for any resulting sales. Additionally, a gift-card pack will be sold with a pair of $25 cards, one for Ticketmaster and one for iTunes. Last month, Ticketmaster gave away 5 free iTunes song credits to anyone who joined its Facebook group. No word on if you can be a "fan" of Ticketmaster on Facebook yet — or if anyone would "fan" the much-hated ticketing conglomerate without bribery.

Ticketmaster's history of getting bought and sold

Owen Thomas — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:25:03 EST

By our count, Ticketmaster's upcoming spinoff from IAC will be the seventh time Barry Diller has bought or sold a piece of the online-ticketing agency, starting from the first stake he acquired in it a decade ago. After the jump, a chronology of Diller's Ticketmaster deals.

July 1997 Diller's company acquires 50 percent of Ticketmaster Group, from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen
May 1998 Acquires remaining half of Ticketmaster from public shareholders
September 1998 Ticketmaster Online merges with CitySearch, an online city guide
December 1998Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch (TMCS) completes IPO
January 2001 Ticketmaster merges with TMCS
January 2003 Diller buys remainder of Ticketmaster
November 2007 Diller announces Ticketmaster spinoff

(Source: IAC)

Madonna dumps record companies, signs with concert promoter

Jordan Golson — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:32:54 EDT

More and more artists are striking innovative deals to sell their music — and leaving the traditional record industry contract behind. The Wall Street Journal reports that once Madonna's contract with Warner Music is up, she will link up with concert-promoter Live Nation. While not as revolutionary as Radiohead's pay-what-you-want plan, or Prince's free-music-with-newspaper deal, Live Nation is a concert production company, not a record label. Madonna's deal will bring album production and distribution, concerts, merchandise and publicity under one company.

In an attempt to counter Live Nation's concert/album/merchandise bid, Warner got Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp involved. IAC owns Ticketmaster, whose ticketing deal with Live Nation expired in August. Even so, the money was too much for Madonna to refuse. Under the new deal, Madonna will collect $120 million over 10 years plus 90 percent of tour revenue.

Madonna's albums will still be distributed through normal retail channels. Live Nation doesn't have a distribution arm, so it will contract, instead, with another label. Also unusual for the industry is a term under which ownership of the three albums to be recorded will revert to Madonna after a certain period of time.

Other big groups will be watching Madonna, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead to see how their ventures work out. The fact that players like Live Nation are getting in the business tells us that middlemen will continue to play a role in connecting musicians with listeners. It just won't be the same middlemen as before.

(AP Photo/Matt Dunham)