Diller warns that media’s transition to new era will get ‘bloody’
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IAC/InteractiveCorp CEO Barry Diller predicted that the Internet is headed toward a three-revenue stream business: advertising, subscriptions and transactions.
It won’t be a smooth process though. Diller, who was speaking at the Fortune magazine Brainstorm Tech Conference in Pasadena, warned that the years ahead are not going to be easy for producers of content.
‘We are transitioning from an old form to a new form and those things are always bloody,’ he said. Diller added that the Internet is still in its infancy and while the initial approach of media was putting content out there for free, it was with the intent that dollars would follow.
As for his news website, ‘The Daily Beast,’ Diller said that the site has ‘done a very good early job’ creating compelling content, adding that the site is ‘not a hard thing to finance’ but ‘it’s going to have to earn its way.’
The mogul also flashed some wit during his interview with Fortune’s Andy Serwer. Asked about churn on his dating site Match.com, Diller cracked, ‘what often happens is it doesn’t work out.’
As for Twitter, which Diller has been downbeat on as a business, he said, ‘it’s a great communications device’ that doesn’t seem like a ‘natural’ for advertising. His pet peeve with Twitter, he said, is people describing the minutia of their lives. ‘People expect you to do something.’
As for Facebook, he said, ‘I don’t have any friends.’
-- Joe Flint
