Diller Adds New Title

That sweetheart, Barry Diller, CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp., added another title to his long list of monikers this week. His new title is King of Hypocrites, which can be added to Toughest Boss (FORTUNE magazine) and Most Overpaid Executive (Over $240 million last year).
At a Forbes conference in Beverly Hills, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Diller said that when it comes to the disruptive power of the Internet, incumbent media companies still ‘don’t get it,’ with the possible exception of News Corp. His advice to media executives is to build new things online from scratch, and he praised Time Warner for doing just that in the form of TMZ.com.” For the uninitiated, TMZ is a wildly popular celebrity gossip site on AOL.
Diller advising media companies to build new things online from scratch is like Mel Karmazin advising his managers to be sweet, kind, and extravagant. IAC owns 60 brands, all of which it bought to cobble together a warmed-over bouillabaisse of websites: Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves.com), CitySearch.com, CollegeHumor.com, Evite.com, Gifts.com, Home Shopping Network, LendingTree.com, Match.com, and Ticketmaster.com, to name a few.
IAC has developed nothing new, to my knowledge, so his advice to incumbent media companies, based on his reign at IAC, should have been, “You’re not structured to be innovative, so buy whatever websites you can at bargain prices, see if you can sell advertising on them at low prices, pay yourself a lot of money before anyone catches on that you’re not a good executive or strategic thinker, and give speeches so people will think you know what you’re talking about. Then, you might be able to take over the title of King of Hypocrites.”
Don’t worry, Barry, your title is safe for a while.