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Rumor: Diller’s IACI Bids for NYT’s About.com

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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A circulating rumor picked by by Reuters and Bloomberg claims that Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) has bid $300 million for About.com, a search property owned by The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT). It was reported a week ago that the firm which owns Answer.com had offered $270 million for About.com. The offer lacked funding.

It would be hard to find a better home for About.com than IACI. It already owns search property Ask.com, which gathers a relatively small portion of U.S. online searches. About.com has the potential to give Diller’s search operations additional reach. IACI also has a large back-office and corporate staff which would likely allow About.com expenses to be cut.

The current challenge with About.com is that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) cut the site’s page rank two years ago because of the search sites aggregation methods. That has caused a sharp slide in revenue and operating profit.  That problem likely cannot be reversed.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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