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Is FiLife Running On Borrowed Time?

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Less than two months after talking up the turnaround at Dow Jones-IAC (NSDQ: IACI) personal finance JV FiLife, paidContent has learned the site’s continued existence is no certainty. It survived the multiple trimmings as Barry Diller cut back on IAC’s portfolio of emerging businesses, but the company is now exploring options that range from leaving it open to a sale or a full shut down. When Ezra Kucharz, president and GM for just over a year, left for CBS (NYSE: CBS) in January, both IAC and DJ credited him publicly with turning around the site and building it to the #4 personal finance site with 4.4 million unique visitors in December. Now both companies are declining comment about the site’s future.

One possibility for IAC could be selling its stake to Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS), which recently bought out SmartMoney partner Hearst. But that’s a well-established brand with an 800,000-circ magazine. Whether DJ would even want to own FiLife outright is unclear—as is whether a deal actually would involve much money. What FiLife does have—more traffic than SmartMoney.com, where personal finance is just one category, and a digital mentality. Is there a way to combine the two?

FiLife has had a bit of a tortured life from its beginning: taking more than a year to move from an idea to a blog, then taking so long to emerge from that status the plans appeared to be dormant. Dave Kansas, brought in from the Wall Street Journal to launch the site, was replaced by online vet Kucharz in late 2008. Adam Wiener, executive editor and VP-content was promoted to GM when Kucharz left, but not given the title of president.

It’s made strides on the editorial side. Just last month FastCompany picked it as the most innovative company in the finance area for using “a Q&A format with a host of social and game-like features to get Americans talking about money. More as warranted—and please feel free to e-mail me if you have details.

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Staci D. Kramer
@sdkstl Mar 19, 2010 11:15 PM ET

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Posted In: Features, Exclusive, Media & Publishing, Online News, Companies, IAC, News Corp., Dow Jones

  • Newsday Friend

    Variety recently reported that Cablevision executives who also run Newsday will get fat
    bonuses in the New Year even as they ask union wage-earners, middle-class folks on Long Island, to accept a 10 percent to 15 percent pay cut. That’s right: The contract that the Newsday unions will vote on in less than two weeks asks for a cruel giveback of wages that will seriously harm these workers’
    ability to provide for their families. Thanks, Cablevision.

  • I'm not terribly familiar with LI, but it's a large and fragmented metropolitan area, like Los Angeles, or Silicon Valley. Does Newsday *really* provide the necessary depth of coverage to justify charging for access in any one of these communities?

    It's not clear to me that community access channels will provide the depth of coverage needed.  Who's paying for that?

  • Greg Spira

    Only http://www.news12.com/LI - which, of course, is also owned by Cablevision.

    The only other news coverage of Long Island is the 11 o'clock news on Ch 55.  They aren't owned by Cablevision, they just depend on Cablevision carrying the channel to 90% of their viewers..

    There are lots of weekly community newspapers that cover cities and towns, but that's hardly the same thing.  And there's no real alternative press of note.

    Meanwhile, Cablevision, of course, runs almost all the community access channels on Long Island, so incorporating hyperlocal content, such as video of local board/council/committee meetings - into the Newsday web site, would probably be pretty easy.

  • Staci D. Kramer

    @ Greg—I think that's a very good shot and you're right about direct news competition on Long Island. Are there any news web sites there doing similar LI coverage?

  • Greg Spira

    I think I see where Cablevision is going with this.  Everybody who gets Internet access through Cablevision - and that's probably half of Long Island - and all Newsday subscribers - will continue to get Newsday's web site - which will probably get beefed up video and interactivity - for free.  So even if no one buys a paid subscription, most local readers will continue to get the site for free,, so advertisers will still have a good reason to advertise on the site even if no one buys a subscription.  Sure, Newsday will be selling subscriptions to the website, but the primary goal here is to give Cablevision a way of differentiating itself from Verizon's competing FIOS service with something that Verizon can't respond to.

    Newsday actually doesn't have much competition on the Island; none of the other NYC metropolitan papers provide significant coverage of Nassau and Suffolk.

    This could conceivably work, but it's not a model that would be available to many other papers.

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