Barry Diller and IAC officially won their day in court on Friday: The parent of Ask.com will break up its conglomerate into five branches. According to TechCrunch, the new companies will be the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Interval International, and the new IAC, which will be an umbrella for various web properties, including Ask.com. The move is expected to revitalize IAC’s online businesses, but TechCrunch notes:
The problem, as came out during the trial, is that those underlying Web businesses are not growing as fast as Diller had hoped either. Ask.com failed to reach its goal of doubling its market share of search
, and Ticketmaster missed out on the growth of the secondary ticket market and recently had to buy TicketsNow for $265 million to compete with StubHub (owned by eBay).
More:
- paidContent has a great breakdown of why IAC was in court in the first place.
