Continuing to pare back on its emerging businesses, IAC (NSDQ: IACI) has unloaded its majority stake in the VeryShortList, an e-mail newsletter guide similar to DailyCandy, to Jared Kushner’s Observer Media Group, publisher of the NY Observer. VSL’s assets are going into a joint venture with Observer as the majority partner and IAC keeping a stake. (The New York Post reports 80-20.) No other terms were disclosed. The core newsletter will be renamed The Observer’s Very Short List and will continue to recommend one cultural recommendation a day. VSL has 200,000 subscribers. Very Short List was launched in 2006 by Kurt Andersen, IAC’s Michael Jackson, Tim Nolan, Emily Oberman, and Bonnie Siegler, with IAC’s backing. The founders are supposed to remain involved. The site employed about six full-time staffers, who were let go last week as the deal between IAC and Observer Media was being finalized, Gawker reported. Sara Vilkomerson, a former VeryShortList editor now at Observer Media, will be heading up the site. Release Staci adds: This means the end of VSL‘s other newsletters—at least for now. Subscribers to VSL: Web received an e-mail today telling them that Friday’s was the last and that if they weren’t subscribers to VSL Classic, they are now. It will be sent “automatically.” VSL also produced a science newsletter and was in the process of adding newsletters for kids, food and books.  We’ve confirmed that VSL:Science has been closed, too, and that plans for the other niches have been dropped so the company can focus on the “classic” newsletter. 

Continuing to pare back on its emerging businesses, IAC (NSDQ: IACI) has unloaded its majority stake in the VeryShortList, an e-mail newsletter guide similar to DailyCandy, to Jared Kushner’s Observer Media Group, publisher of the NY Observer. VSL’s assets are going into a joint venture with Observer as the majority partner and IAC keeping a stake. (The New York Post reports 80-20.) No other terms were disclosed. The core newsletter will be renamed The Observer’s Very Short List and will continue to recommend one cultural recommendation a day. VSL has 200,000 subscribers. Very Short List was launched in 2006 by Kurt Andersen, IAC’s Michael Jackson, Tim Nolan, Emily Oberman, and Bonnie Siegler, with IAC’s backing. The founders are supposed to remain involved. The site employed about six full-time staffers, who were let go last week as the deal between IAC and Observer Media was being finalized, Gawker reported. Sara Vilkomerson, a former VeryShortList editor now at Observer Media, will be heading up the site. Release Staci adds: This means the end of VSL‘s other newsletters—at least for now. Subscribers to VSL: Web received an e-mail today telling them that Friday’s was the last and that if they weren’t subscribers to VSL Classic, they are now. It will be sent “automatically.” VSL also produced a science newsletter and was in the process of adding newsletters for kids, food and books.  We’ve confirmed that VSL:Science has been closed, too, and that plans for the other niches have been dropped so the company can focus on the “classic” newsletter. 

Continuing to pare back on its emerging businesses, IAC (NSDQ: IACI) has unloaded its majority stake in the VeryShortList, an e-mail newsletter guide similar to DailyCandy, to Jared Kushner’s Observer Media Group, publisher of the NY Observer. VSL’s assets are going into a joint venture with Observer as the majority partner and IAC keeping a stake. No other terms were disclosed. The core newsletter will be renamed The Observer’s Very Short List and will continue to recommend one cultural recommendation a day. VSL has 200,000 subscribers. Very Short List was launched in 2006 by Kurt Andersen, IAC’s Michael Jackson, Tim Nolan, Emily Oberman, and Bonnie Siegler, with IAC’s backing. The founders are supposed to remain involved. The site employed about six full-time staffers, who were let go last week as the deal between IAC and Observer Media was being finalized, Gawker reported. Sara Vilkomerson, a former VeryShortList editor now at Observer Media, will be heading up the site. Release Staci adds: This means the end of VSL‘s other newsletters—at least for now. Subscribers to VSL: Web received an e-mail today telling them that Friday’s was the last and that if they weren’t subscribers to VSL Classic, they are now. It will be sent “automatically.” VSL also produced a science newsletter and was in the process of adding newsletters for kids, food and books.

Looking to pare back on efforts that aren’t working, IAC has unload its majority stake in the VeryShortList, an e-mail newsletter guide similar to DailyCandy, to Jared Kushner’s Observer Media Group, publisher of the NY Observer. Terms were not disclosed. The site, which is currently preparing or refurbishing newsletters covering recommendations related to science, kids and food, will operate as a joint venture between Observer Media and IAC (NSDQ: IACI).  VeryShortList was launched in 2006 by Kurt Andersen, Michael Jackson, Tim Nolan, Emily Oberman, and Bonnie Siegler, with IAC’s backing. The site employed about six full-time staffers, who were let go last week as the deal between IAC and Observer Media was being finalized, Gawker reported. Sara Vilkomerson, a former VeryShortList editor now at Observer Media, will be heading up the site. Release

The backdrop behind the front desk in the lobby of IAC’s Chelsea headquarters shows glittering lights on a world map, each one signaling a visit to one of the company’s websites—more than 835 million across its network in April from roughly 194 million uniques, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). Use a blue wheel and you can see a specific site: search engine Ask, Citysearch, Match.com, ServiceMagic, virtual worlds Zwinky and GirlSense, Daily Beast and more. But not as many as there were before IAC (NSDQ: IACI) spun into five pieces, leaving this version a more manageable size with only 35 or so brands. No Expedia. No Lending Tree. No Ticketmaster. No HSN (NSDQ: HSNI). Barry Diller’s grand dream of convergence that once included cable networks and transactions has been pared down to a pure internet company that doesn’t rely on synergies. In part one of his interview with paidContent focusing on that shift in digital strategy, Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC, talked about his realization that “a ‘glomeration,’ or multiple disparate assets, was a bad management concept.” In part two, he talks about what’s left at IAC, the further “editing” of its emerging businesses (yesterday, IAC confirmed RushmoreDrive.com is closing), and why it’s “silly” to talk about business models for Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. Edited excerpts below. Staci D. Kramer: Citysearch. You’ve gone though a remake of it. You added Urbanspoon. What does it signify to you? Barry Diller: It gives unique content. Urbanspoon is a nice, little application … and it’s perfect, of course, for Citysearch because of the reviews it contains and the ability for Citysearch to use that content. We’ve also bought Insider Pages, which is the same kind, also review based, because the more content Citysearch has, the stronger it’s going to be. It has a huge audience 25-28 million uniques a month. That’s huge. Who do you see as its main competitor? The next competitor would be Yelp, which is a bit of a different concept. Vegas.com is a good example. In terms of the big players … For Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Ask, the players of search, AOL (NYSE: TWX)—their efforts at local, they have never really attacked the way Citysearch has city by city, merchant by merchant, which is where Citysearch really has established itself. It has a lot of publishers, a huge number of publishers, and an awful lot of traffic in a circle of commerce. A lot of applications have online versions of themselves but none of them have really done the job.  The directory businesses are in huge trouble. The directories businesses still make nothing but money. They’re overleveraged, they’re bankrupt entities, but they still are the largest. This is all going to move online over time. Why Citysearch and ServiceMagic are so important to us, is because nobody has really colonized it yet completely. There’s no question that local activity is going to continue forever. Organizing it online is probably the most difficult area (thumping desk for punctuation) because it is so local. There are so many merchants, so connecting it into a service that both gets you the things you want to know about all of those services in one place and then has the commerce relationships, the merchant relationships—talk about impossible tasks. Citysearch has been working on it for 10 years and it’s a third of the way there, 20 percent of the way there. It’s way ahead of everybody else. Ask isn’t going to be the #1 search engine. Ask is a distant player in search. Search is a big market and it’s a smaller player but it has revenues for us in excess of $500 million a year so that’s not nothing. We believe that can be built upon. What needs to happen with Ask in its next iteration—with Jim (Safka) leaving, with Microsoft reforming and putting a $100 million into their ad campaign? Bing is a better effort than the one they had and they’ll put a lot behind it and they’ll increase their queries. Ask has been, from the period a year ago, has been each quarter increasing its queries year over year, adding audience, not as fast as we would like and we simply have to keep going and building that with the recognition that a head-on approach to Google is not going to work. What we do believe will work is giving people answers to queries rather than 10 blue links. It’s hacking it through the side, through the verticals, being the best. Currently one example that is out there at the moment is being the search engine of Nascar. Looking at the emerging businesses, do you want to keep the ones you have now or are you still winnowing? We’re winnowing.  You’re taking your time with it.. We’re editing. We’re going to continue to edit everywhere. There’s been some heat on the Daily Beast for not having a business model to match the success of its early branding. They got out of the gate so much faster than a lot of people would have thought but even Tina (Brown) and Caroline (Marks) admitted early on, no, we’re working on the business model, we want to get the brand out there. It’s silly. The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions—or some new invention, But right now what we’ve got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content. Right? You can do a little bit with e-commerce, but yes. E-Commerce? Well, with placement—if you see something in a story, you can buy it through the story. Please, that’s silly. That was tried. That’s never going to happen. It’s not like you’re in search of a business model. What we decided was to do something different with the Daily Beast. We knew we would not produce any real revenue until we had established the brand, so to speak, established the content as a place that anybody wanted to access. What we said was we’re not going to take any ads. I didn’t not want to—we actually did in a misunderstanding, we did take an ad very early, which when I saw it, I said, ‘how can you do this? This is terrible.’ I don’t want to take an ad now because it’s not going to produce revenue for us at this stage and until we conceptualize a manner of advertising that is different than standard display, the little 2X300 box, which we don’t want to do at the Daily Beast, until we figure that out, I don’t want to take any advertising. In the early period, we worked on a concept for advertising that was different than the current method of display advertising. The first rollout for that was a Bottega Veneta ad, which nobody had ever seen before. That’s what we’re going to pursue—a magazine approach to advertising, an art approach to advertising rather than an internet approach to advertising. The ‘lack of a business model’ was nuts. Business model, in this case, makes no sense. There are only a couple of ways to pay for content. Either advertisers or you can charge in macro or micro subscription payments. Within that, we do think we are innovating how to do advertising in a different way than has been done before on the internet. I guess you picked a good time to have a business that you didn’t want advertising for. Yes, it’s convenient. We knew if you’re going to start a content business, the idea that you’re going to get any revenue to support it in the early days is foolishness. How much time do you see for that? Do you adjust it according to the environment? Do you and Tina have … In anything like that, anything you say is bullshit. So I don’t want to say it. I could say, well, two years, but a year and a half from now, it’s only about 6 months old, how the hell do I know what the conditions are going to be, what success we will have achieved editorially in terms of the brand, what kind of revenue we’ll be getting.  I don’t know. You have $2 billion in cash. You could acquire a lot more now than you have a year ago with that same amount money. Probably so. But you don’t want an AOL. We’re not out there acquiring. AOL doing the right thing with the spinoff? Yes, profoundly.

Single Senior Women Twice As Likely as Male Counterparts to Name Obama; Sadly, Washington, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt Don’t Make the Grade

Women More Likely than Men to Just Take Care of Business; Men Are Twice as Likely to ‘Get a Date, Any Date’

For the quarter, the company, which also owns Match.com and Citysearch, posted a profit of 20 cents a share compared with analysts'  forecast of 17 cents a share.

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IAC InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) opened at $21.70. So far today, the stock has hit a low of $21.61 and a high of $22.25. IACI is now trading at $21.99, up $0.83 (3.9%). Over the last 52 weeks the stock has ranged ...(Click the story link or go to http://www.marketintelligencecenter.com for the full story)

IAC InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) closed yesterday at $21.16. So far the stock has hit a 52-week low of $13.23 and 52-week high of $22.28. IAC InterActiveCorp stock has been showing support around 20.64 and resistance in the 21.60 range. Technical indicators for the stock are Bullish and S&P gives IACI a n...(Click the story link or go to http://www.marketintelligencecenter.com for the full story)

Visit StreetInsider.com at http://www.streetinsider.com/news.php?st=p&id=5321051 for the full story.

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), MEMC Electronic Materials, Inc. (NYSE:WFR), and MasterCard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) are three notable analyst upgrades, downgrades and comments made during today’s session. Analyst: IACI has “Highly Compelling” Valuation IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI, Free Analysis), a diversified Internet business operator in the U.S. and various jurisdictions abroad, may be trading up 57% from its 52-week lows and trading near [...]

The best value investors, all seem to say same thing, buy what you know. To us, that means spend time researching companies with recognizable brands. Companies such as Ticketmaster, Inc. (Nasdaq: TKTM), HSN, Inc. (Nasdaq: HSNI), and Tree.Com. Inc. (Nasdaq: TREE) are all companies spun off by IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI). Not really doing it for you [...]

(IACI) InterActiveCorp Makes the Connection

( click to enlarge ) (GIGM) has lots of value, however the weak market is pushing the stock down. It has made a new 52 weeks low on Wednesday, but a last-minute rally helped it close at $2.78. The technical daily chart shows possible rally as K line is back above D line. Volume is shrinking ...

Fellow Stockmasters, what if I told you that you could buy shares of one company and within a relatively short amount of time have that convert to shares of 5 different public companies, with over 60 brands? Sounds crazy doesn’t it? IACI announced the news last November, and the deal is still in the works. I think Wall Street has overlooked the magnitude of this spinoff and buying IACI before the spin could potentially be a great investment.

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Tom Dorsey and Tammy DeRosier - 400 Point Dow Rally - Where Do We Go From Here?

Tom Dorsey and Tammy DeRosier - Take Advantage of Today's Market with Covered Writing

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Music industry morsels from partnerships to management changes are covered this week. You know ITunes is number one in on online music but who is right on their heals? Could there be an IPO for eMusic? Invest in great management. Is that what Decker is saying to Wall Street? Now that Dow Jones is part of NWS, what are we to make of FiLife? (IACI) (DJ) (SNE) (MSFT) (AAPL) (YHOO)