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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

Hourglass

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

  • digital marketing domino

    Really Good Move from Yahoo… http://digitalmarketingdomino.blogspot.com/2008/09/yahoo-apt-online-advertising-products.html

  • McG

    Bigagency is more like bigangry.  Anyone that calls themselves 'big' anything or 'insider' is often neither…and it shows.  If you think what's being done is 'already available from Atlas or DART' then why are both MSFT and GOOG creating new technologies to replace DART and Atlas.

  • geewhiz

    Good call on the Walrath quote. They failed miserably at Search even though it's easier?

  • BigAgencyInsider

    I'm with "geewhiz".  Some random food for thought:

    1) Funny how YHOO thinks they're cutting edge with so much of their crap because they never look outside their ever-shrinking house.  Just about everything they lay out in their "pie-in-the-sky" vision is already available from Atlas & DART.  They're the laughing stock in agency circles yet they tout how much we (agencies) love them in the press….classic denial from a one-time behemoth & current "has-been".

    2) Um, marrying a dying industry like newspapers and a dying company like Yahoo does not create value.  There are already half a dozen companies allowing me to buy across 1 or 1000s of newspaper w/o a problem.

    3) Why haven't they been able to get any non-newspaper companies on this thing??  Bueller??

    4) My favorite is Walrath's line about "...Search is simple…display is more difficult.."  They couldn't get search right & are whoring out to Google since they blew the MSFT deal to save their executive jobs.  They've been losing display share for quarters on quarters…MySpace served the most ads as of last Comscore numbers. 

    5) For David, are you sure they said they'll have the 779 partners migrated to this apt platform by 1/1/2009??  I don't see that happening.  They won't even let us use it now b/c of an inability to support a large user like ourselves.  i don't even think the thing is being used by their own support teams yet based on what I've been hearing….any clarification here??

    6) Net-net, sure this will bring in a few hundred million for YHOO in 2010 - kudos, but it's a drop in the bucket.  But this is hardly deserving of all the hype and anyone expecting something "game changing" will be severely disappointed.

  • geewhiz

    All embarrassing rubbish. They will lose in display the way the lost in Search.

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