Interactive Corp announced its Q4 earnings today, and hefty charges pushed down profit by 85 percent, but revenue climbed in each of its divisions. Net income after paying preferred dividends dropped to $16.7 million from $113.1 million a year ago. Revenue rose 8 percent to $1.82 billion from $1.69 billion in the prior-year period. On its Media & Advertising side (which includes Ask), revenue growth was driven by an increase in queries and higher revenue per query across most properties, the company said. Tevenues grew on the strength of Ask.com in the U.S. and “Fun Web” products, offset by weakness at portal properties and Ask.com UK.
More details in release.
Update: From the transcript by Seeking Alpha: Barry Diller, chairman and CEO, on original content: “As we said, we believe that this is a good time to develop original programming. By that, even though the [WSJ] talked today about shorts, that’s not our primary focus but we will do it within college humor and other things. But our primary focus really is not short films; it is original ideas. 23-7 is the definition of an original idea, which we will be going out with in a couple of months. We understand how to institutionalize a program department. That’s really where potential successes are going to come from. Original is the right way to go. I’m not saying we wouldn’t buy anything, but I would much prefer to create something that is from an original idea and take it where it can go.”
— Diller was questioned about the timeline regarding plans to use Ask.com as the “glue” to pull all a number of assets together, such as the company’s recent move to combine its Ticketmaster division, its
Citysearch local directory unit and the Ask.com search engine together with AskCity. Past indications were that it could be resolved in the next month. “I don’t think I said a month, but I certainly indicated
sooner rather than later. Our desire, if we can and we don’t know if we can. It may be that the best track for us is to see how Panama strengthens and that the gap between Google and Yahoo narrows and that
Microsoft makes some progress. But they are all interested in talking with us now, and some of them are putting things at us now that try to demand that we move the timetable up, at least demand that we consider doing so. We now are 10 percent of Google’s syndication business. We bring a lot of traffic; we bring a lot of queries. On Ask, I’m going to just drop in here from ’05 to ’06 we increased searches from 1.1 billion to 1.75 billion. That’s a lot of searches. That’s a lot of ad possibilities going on. If somebody wants out there more share, more queries, or advertising revenue, we are pretty good clients.”
— Doug Lebda, president and COO, on what Peter Horan, the new CEO of media and advertising, brings to the table: “One is his experience with content businesses, how to monetize them in new and innovative ways and make sure that you can drive traffic through different means than just advertising against them. At the same time, though, I would also say he brings more bandwidth, so the more great executives we can bring in, the more ideas that we can actually execute against. The good news, in this instance, though, is he wasn’t brought in to fill a hole. We’ve got a great team of executives
running those businesses; we always have.”
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