Diller’s Web: Think Cable of the Past

ウェブサービスの一代王国を立ち上げたBarry Dillerの戦略：ケーブルは過去のものと考えよ

James Estrin/The New York Times

Published: October 31, 2006

Barry Dillerがテレビ、映画業界の大物のMichael Jacksonをprogramming president at the IAC/InterActiveCorpとして採用したとき、投資家にDillerがエンタテインメント業界に戻るつもりではないことを納得させるのに苦労した。
インタービューの中でDillerはMr. Jacksonに今後数年かけて、多くのベンチャーを立ち上げてほしいと考えていることを明らかにした。
Mr. Jacksonの次のプロジェクトで来年、登場予定のものは相変わらず、陽気な雰囲気を持っている。継続的に更新される冷やかしのsatiricalウェブサイトでThe Huffington Postとのジョイントベンチャーである。
Mr. Jacksonのキャリアからすれば、更に多くのものが用意されているはずだ。
ケーブルテレビの世界は保守的になってしまったとDiller to Jacksonは嘆く。
The Huffington Post と組んだのは同社がウェブビジネスを迅速に立ち上げることに長けていると判断したためである。
The Onionという風刺ウェブサイトと出版の社長は、ウェブがユーモア表現にとくに適していることが明らかになったという。
まだビジネスモデルが確立していないものに大きな賭けをするということは、これまでやったことが無い。
代わりに、自分自身のベンチャーを始め、まだ非常に小さな段階で投資することを選択するとMr.Jacksonは言う。
次に注目しているのはニュースで、ニュースのアグリゲーションと編集、更に最上の情報に人々を注目させるようなものと言うが、詳細は明らかにしなかった。

When Barry Diller hired longtime television and film executive Michael Jackson as programming president at the IAC/InterActiveCorp, he had to reassure investors that he was not going back into the entertainment business.
Instead, a glimpse at Mr. Jackson’s early efforts in online programming are now coming into view: he is thinking big by going small, investing in and starting targeted content sites built around humor, news and popular culture that remind him of the early efforts in cable television programming.
In an interview, Mr. Diller said he expected Mr. Jackson to carry out perhaps dozens of such ventures during the next few years. “The amount of capital we’ll put in this over time will be hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “This is a wonderful area right now to invest in.”
The company recently unveiled a test version of a new daily newsletter and Web site, Very Short List, which carries recommendations of unheralded cultural and entertainment products, including books, CDs and DVDs. And in August, IAC acquired control of the Web site www.collegehumor.com — whose name is fairly self-explanatory, though its appeal depends on which college you attended.
Mr. Jackson’s next project, scheduled for a debut next year, continues in a mirthful vein: a continuously updated satirical Web site that IAC is beginning as a joint venture with The Huffington Post, the assemblage of left-of-center blogs that was founded last year and is edited by the author and pundit Arianna Huffington.
Mr. Jackson’s career suggests that more is in store for him. Before he ran the television business of USA Networks and the Universal Television Group, which were acquired by NBC in 2003, he was the chief executive of Channel 4 in his native Britain.
A clincher for Mr. Jackson was that at the beginning of this year, Trio, a small cable channel for nonfiction programming that he and Mr. Diller had taken a particular interest in, was recast as Sleuth. It shows reruns of the investigative police shows that dominate prime time. “The cable world has become conservative,” Mr. Jackson lamented.
During his interregnum, Mr. Jackson was thinking Webby thoughts. He collaborated with the author and journalist Kurt Andersen and the designers Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman to develop a collection of eclectic and carefully “curated” items (books, CDs and so on) boxed together and periodically shipped to subscribers.
That was the origin of Very Short List, which has evolved into a daily newsletter and Web site because Mr. Jackson and Mr. Diller — who financed the venture through IAC and rehired his old colleague in January — deemed the box concept too expensive to succeed at first.
In the case of the planned satire site, Mr. Jackson said he had sought out The Huffington Post as a partner because it appeared to know how to start up a Web business quickly. The Huffington Post ranked 24th in the blogs category of Web sites during the month of September, with 635,000 unique visitors, according to comScore Networks.
Sean Mills, president of The Onion, a satirical Web site and publication, said that the Web had proved to be particularly suited to humor. But “to maintain it over a long period of time is a very difficult thing,” he added, “and something that we are constantly challenged with.”
Where CollegeHumor was concerned, Mr. Jackson conceded that the site might not be for everybody.
“What attracted us to CollegeHumor is it’s a brand,” Mr. Jackson said. “I think those things that have a point of view can be successful on the Web. That’s a model that goes back forever.”
Mr. Diller said that although IAC could afford a big acquisition like the $1 billion said to be sought for Facebook, a social networking site, he was reluctant to do so. “Making very large bets on businesses that don’t yet have a business model is just not our history,” he said. “I’ll leave that to the media imperialists.”
Instead, he and Mr. Jackson said they favored the economics of starting their own ventures and investing in nascent ones. “This is a medium where how much you spend has much less effect on the outcome than ever before,” Mr. Jackson said. “Some of the best content online has been created by amateurs for nothing.”
Mr. Jackson appears to be something of an island unto himself at IAC, whose better known operations, including the Home Shopping Network, Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Match.com, LendingTree and the search engine Ask.com, generate more than $6 billion a year in revenue.
He said his next area of focus might be news — a site that aggregates and edits news and helps point people to the best information available — but he was not ready to talk about specifics.
Whatever he does, his friends expect it to make a splash.
“If there’s something to do online that makes sense,” Mr. Andersen, the author, said, “he’s as well positioned as any 48-year-old guy to figure out what that is.”