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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

  • Jen M

    I see it just as any other news site like http://www.NEooWS.com.

  • There is no doubt newser has an eye catching appeal….the content too is good…but m wondering as to why didn’t the ppl behind it allow space for comments, ain’t it that important?....I can see it in other news aggregators like http://www.instablogs.com/ and http://www.newsvine.com/.

  • It certainly looks very nice. It doesn’t seem, however, that the way in which it aggregates stories is all-together groundbreaking. According to the About section on the site -
    “Newser’s story selection is based on a proprietary formula that measures the ubiquity of coverage by the top-ranked 100 English-language news sites; the prominence with which those sites feature the stories; and the popularity of a given story with readers; and overlooked points of view, angles and scoops uncovered by our editors.”

    I remember talking to one of the editors at Bloomberg News last year and one of the big hurdles which still hasn’t been crossed is determining which stories are indeed important well before the process of filtration by thousands of people. This is particularly pertinent for Bloomberg’s news feed which is watched by rather time-sensitive individuals.

  • Newser looks nice but it is like shoe-horning a portal play onto a web which is increasingly focused on niche and application/function, not on telling me which story is "big" right now. The point is, I already know that. I don't see this working…

  • Rafat Ali

    Thanks Jake and Peter…I'll try harder to live up to your grammatical standards the next time.

  • Rafat -

    Obviously I like their concept—but not sure what differentiated value they bring by only going after top 100 sites.  At BuzzTracker we are explicitly searching the top 100 THOUSAND news sources every day for the most important stories across over 1,700 and counting topics.  Our premise is the only way to go granular is to cast a wide net—and that granular is where there is still white space and where the future value will be delivered (how many places can you go to get sports news for example?) compared to places to find news on Vietnam, or Carlos Zambrano, or Colon Cancer.

  • peter

    jake is right. the post contains grammatical errors, missing words and several sentences that border on incomprehensibility. one knows, sort of, what the writer has in mind, but in journalism, "sort of" isn't good enough.

  • jake

    And of course, the site is not reachable.

    By the way, Rafat, do you ever read through your posts, even once, before posting? You really need to.

  • Brandon

    Be nice if the site actually loaded…

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