Keynote Speaker
Wednesday, February 7th
Barry Diller, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Chairman of Expedia, Inc.

• Acquisition of Ask Jeeves
  • Fear of disintermediation by search
  • Defensive strategy to protect against this disintermediation
  • “Value added information will live”
  • “Is there an opportunity?”
  • “Competing with less resources is a good thing”
  • “Could we move to the left”
  • How much market share can ask really build…Barry, “I think we can build double digits share”
  • “Media models have multiple players”
  • “Ask is the glue between all of our business’s”
    • Ties together multiple pieces of IAC
  • “One fat datastream tamed for consumers”
  • Social Networks
    • Barry says he is not in the scene
    • Talks about Match.com
    • “How can you do more social networking than flirt”
    • Pure social networks are an upgrade from the mall
    • “They tend to leave us and as life goes, they tend to come back” in reference to Match.com (got quite a laugh)
  • UGC
    • “we come up with these terms that don’t mean very much”
    • “the professional talent pool is finite”
      • People doing things that lots of people want to see
    • “As time goes on, professionally made products…..that is going to be where this is going to develop into”
    • “news gathering organizations are not going away, they simply need to find a form factor”
    • “the issue is form factor so the people get it….in that delivery there is going to have to be reinvention”
  • Recent acquisition of College Humor/Content Play
    • We really want to invent product. Start with an idea and then….
    • 100 million dollars of capital to invest in products
    • We much prefer to start than buy
    • “I never left programming”
    • Everything will be in a digital form, any screen,
    • Programming is Services or Stories distributed through net neutral pipe
    • Importance of the fact that distribution is not scarce
  • “Buying things for more than they are worth generally does not work out” (tongue in cheek)
  • “This is a much more practical time than in the early 2000’s”
  • Diller on Valuation- “How much can I lost?” is the most important question
  • “It is the height of craziness to read forward on anything”
  • Fragmentation
    • Diller “I don’t think it is happening”
    • “Editorship is what everything is about”
  • “The Internet is this miracle”
  • Commoditization in E-commerce
    • I don’t think there is a lot of innovation out there in terms of retailing
    • There is very little “merchant” on the Internet
    • You haven’t yet seen great merchant experience on the internet
    • Optimistic about invention
    • New ideas will come, it is not all about brick and mortar building a website
  • “Our conglomerate is interrelated”
  • “in a world that is constantly changing the best practices are those which you discover”
  • Diller talks about SEO and how it tripled CitySearch traffic
  • Final Convergence within 3 years
  • No limit to how big IAC can get
  • Tight control distribution models will not exist in 10 years
  • “Jack Welch is the best manager ever invented”

Tags: Barry Diller, Media Summit NYC, 2007, SEO, IAC, Citysearch, ecommerce, convergence, programming, internet, adam broitman, college humor, content, valuation, disintermediation, datastream, match.com, networking, social networking, UGC, professional content, amatuer