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Formerly |
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Company type | Public |
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ISIN | US44891N1090 ![]() |
Industry | Media |
Predecessors | Silver King Communications |
Founded | August 24, 1995 |
Headquarters | IAC Building, , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | |
Products | |
Revenue | ![]() |
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Total assets | ![]() |
Total equity | ![]() |
Number of employees | c. 9,500 (2023) |
Website | www |
Footnotes /references [1] |
IAC Inc. is an American holding company that owns brands across 100 countries, mostly in media and Internet. [2] The company is incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law [3] and headquartered in New York City. [4] Joey Levin, who previously led the company's search and applications segment, [5] has served as chief executive officer since June 2015. [6]
IAC was established in 1986 as Silver King Broadcasting Company, as part of a plan to increase viewership of the Home Shopping Network (HSN) by purchasing local television stations. [7] [8] By 1988, Silver King had bought 11 stations for about $220 million. [8] The company was later renamed as HSN Communications, Inc., and then Silver King Communications, Inc. [7] In 1992, Silver King was spun off to HSN shareholders as a separately traded public company. [9] In August 1995, Barry Diller acquired control of Silver King, in a deal backed by the company's largest shareholder, Liberty Media. [10] [11] Diller, who had led the creation of the Fox network, reportedly hoped to use Silver King's stations as the foundation for a new broadcast network. [11]
The company acquired several assets in the late 1990s. In December 1996, Silver King acquired an 80% stake in HSN for $1.3 billion in stock, and changed its own name to HSN, Inc. [12] [13] [14] At the same time, the company acquired Savoy Pictures, a failed film studio that owned four Fox affiliate stations through SF Broadcasting, for $210 million in stock. [15]
HSN purchased a controlling stake in Ticketmaster Group in July 1997, [16] and then acquired the rest of the company in June 1998. [17] [18] In February 1998, it acquired the television assets of Universal Studios (including USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel, and Universal Television's domestic production and distribution arms) for $4.1 billion. [19] [20] The company's name was changed to USA Networks, Inc. at this point. [20] Continuing its acquisition strategy, the company acquired the Hotel Reservations Network in May 1999 for $149 million. [21] [22]
USA Networks merged the online division of Ticketmaster with city guide website Citysearch in September 1998, establishing a new company that went public as Ticketmaster Online–CitySearch (TMCS). [23] [24] USA then sold Ticketmaster proper to TMCS in 2001, retaining a 61 percent share in the combined company, which became known as simply Ticketmaster. [25] [26] USA brought Ticketmaster back under full ownership in 2003, purchasing all outstanding shares. [27]
In the early 2000s, USA Networks began divesting itself of its traditional television broadcasting and production units. In May 2001, Univision Communications acquired USA Broadcasting (a division of USA Networks including 13 local stations). [28] The next year, Vivendi bought the rest of USA's broadcast entertainment businesses, including the USA Network and Sci-Fi Channel. [29] This led to the creation of a new company named Vivendi Universal Entertainment, led by Diller. [30] Throughout this transition, USA Networks continued to build up its online portfolio. In July 2001, the company entered the online travel business with its acquisition of Expedia, [31] followed the next year by an acquisition of Interval International. [32]
Following the shift in focus to online assets, the company changed its name to USA Interactive (USAI) [33] in May 2002; [34] InterActiveCorp in June 2003; [35] and finally to IAC/InterActiveCorp in July 2004. [36]
In August 2003, IAC acquired the online mortgage comparison site LendingTree, [37] and in September, the company added discount travel website Hotwire.com to its growing list of acquisitions. [38] In October, IAC agreed to buy French travel site Anyway.com from Transat A.T. for $62.7 million. [39]
In 2004 and 2005, IAC continued its growth through acquisition, adding assets including Tripadvisor, [40] ServiceMagic, [41] and Ask Jeeves. [42] It also launched Gifts.com during this period. [43] In August 2005, the company bundled together its travel-related sites and spun them off as a new public company, Expedia, Inc. [44] Additional acquisitions in 2006 included ShoeBuy.com, [45] which the company later sold to Jet, [46] and Connected Ventures including CollegeHumor and Vimeo. [47]
In May 2008, IAC and Ask.com acquired Lexico, the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. [48] In August 2008, IAC spun off several of its businesses, including: Tree.com (formerly LendingTree), the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, and Interval International. [49]
In 2009, IAC acquired Urbanspoon [50] and People Media, [51] and launched the production company Notional. [52] IAC would later sell Urbanspoon to Zomato in 2015. [53]
IAC's largest shareholder, Liberty Media, exited the company in 2010, following a protracted dispute over the 2008 spinoffs. [54] [55] Liberty traded its IAC stock for $220 million in cash, plus ownership of Evite and Gifts.com. [54] On the same day, Diller stepped down as CEO, though he remained as chairman and Match.com CEO Greg Blatt was appointed to succeed him. [54] That same year, IAC acquired dating site Singlesnet [56] and fitness site DailyBurn. [57]
In January 2013, IAC acquired online tutoring firm Tutor.com. [58] On August 3, 2013, IAC sold Newsweek to the International Business Times on undisclosed terms. [59] On December 22, 2013, IAC fired their director of corporate communications, Justine Sacco, after an AIDS joke she posted to Twitter went viral, [60] being re-tweeted and scorned around the world. [61] The incident became a byword for the need for people to be cautious about what they post on social media. [62]
In 2014, IAC acquired ASKfm for an undisclosed sum. [63]
In November 2015, IAC and Match Group announced the closing of Match Group's previously announced initial public offering. [64]
In May 2017, HomeAdvisor combined with Angie's List, forming the new publicly traded company ANGI Homeservices Inc. The company made its stock market debut in October 2017. In October 2018, ANGI made its first acquisition of on-demand platform Handy. [65]
In January 2019, IAC sold Citysearch parent CityGrid to eLocal. [66] In July 2019, IAC made its largest investment ever in the world's largest peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace, Turo. Later that year, IAC acquired Care.com. [67] In December 2019, IAC and Match Group entered into an agreement providing for the full separation of Match Group from the remaining businesses of IAC. [68]
In January 2020, IAC withdrew its financial backing for CollegeHumor and its sister websites and sold the websites to Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich; IAC remains a minority owner of Reich's rebranded company Dropout. As a result of the restructuring, more than 100 employees of CollegeHumor were laid off. [69] In February, IAC completed its $500 million acquisition of Care.com. [70]
In July 2020, IAC and Match Group announced the successful completion of the separation of Match Group from the remaining businesses of IAC. As a result of the separation, Match Group's dual class voting structure was eliminated and the interest in Match Group formerly held by IAC is now held directly by IAC's shareholders. As of the separation, "new" IAC trades under the symbol "IAC" and "new" Match Group under the symbol "MTCH." [71]
In August 2020, IAC announced [72] it had invested a 12% stake in MGM Resorts International.
In May 2021, IAC completed the spin-off of Vimeo, the 11th company to be spun-off from IAC. [73] Vimeo trades on Nasdaq under the symbol "VMEO".
In October 2021, IAC announced the acquisition of Meredith Corporation's National Media Group for $2.7 billion. The deal closed December 1, 2021, [74] and the acquired Meredith (and the former Time Inc.) assets merged with IAC subsidiary Dotdash, forming a new entity called Dotdash Meredith. [75]
In August 2022, IAC officially changed its legal entity (IAC/InterActiveCorp) to reflect what it is actually called: IAC Inc. In October, IAC agreed to sell its workforce-as-a-service platform Bluecrew to EmployBridge [76] with IAC remaining a minority shareholder in Bluecrew's business.
IAC's businesses are categorized into distinct segments for the purposes of financial reporting. Those segments are labelled by the company as Angi Inc., Dotdash Meredith, Search, and Emerging and Other. Each business listed may have multiple brands connected to it.
On May 1, 2017, IAC announced it had entered into a definitive agreement with Angie's List to combine HomeAdvisor, a digital marketplace for maintenance and repair services, and Angie's List into a new publicly traded company named ANGI Homeservices Inc. [77] In March 2021, the company changed its name to Angi. [78]
IAC's board of directors consists of the following members: [6]
Dotdash Meredith is an American digital media company based in New York City. The company publishes online articles and videos about various subjects across categories including health, home, food, finance, tech, beauty, lifestyle, travel, and education. It operates brands including Verywell, Investopedia, People, The Balance, Byrdie, MyDomaine, Brides, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Liquor.com, Lifewire, TripSavvy, TreeHugger, and ThoughtCo. In August 2012, About.com became a property of IAC, owner of Ask.com and numerous other online brands, and its revenue is generated by advertising. In addition to its Manhattan headquarters, Dotdash Meredith maintains offices elsewhere in the New York metropolitan area, as well as in Des Moines, Iowa, and Birmingham, Alabama.
QVC is an American free-to-air television network and a flagship shopping channel specializing in televised home shopping, owned by Qurate Retail Group. Founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel in West Chester, Pennsylvania, United States, QVC broadcasts to more than 350 million households in seven countries, including channels in the UK, Germany, Japan, and Italy, along with a joint venture in China with China National Radio called CNR Mall.
HSN, an initialism of its former name Home Shopping Network, is an American free-to-air television network owned by the Qurate Retail Group, which also owns catalog company Cornerstone Brands. It is based in the Gateway area of St. Petersburg, Florida, United States.
Barry Charles Diller is an American businessman. He is chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and founded the Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting. Diller was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1994.
Hotels.com,L.P. is an American website for booking hotel rooms online and by telephone. The company has 85 websites in 34 languages, and lists over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations. Its inventory includes hotels and B&Bs, and some condos and other types of commercial lodging. Hotels.com was established in 1991 as the Hotel Reservations Network (HRN). In 2001, it became part of Expedia, Inc. and in 2002, changed its name to Hotels.com. The company is operated by Hotels.com LP, a limited partnership subsidiary located in Dallas, Texas, in the United States.
Expedia Group, Inc. is an American travel technology company that owns and operates travel fare aggregators and travel metasearch engines, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets, CarRentals.com, Expedia Cruises, Wotif, and Trivago. Over 3 million lodging facilities and flights on over 500 airlines are bookable on the company's websites. It has 16,500 employees, and its headquarters are located in Seattle, Washington.
Meredith Corporation was an American media conglomerate based in Des Moines, Iowa, that owned magazines, television stations, websites, and radio stations. Its publications had a readership of more than 120 million and paid circulation of more than 40 million, and its websites had nearly 135 million monthly unique visitors. Its broadcast television stations reached 11% of U.S. households.
Citysearch is an online city guide that provides information about businesses in the categories of dining, entertainment, retail, travel, and professional services in cities throughout the United States. Visitors to each of Citysearch's local city guides will find contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial, and user reviews for the businesses listed. Citysearch is headquartered in West Hollywood, California and is an owned and operated web site of CityGrid Media, which is an operating business of eLocal. The original office was in Pasadena, California.
KFSF-DT is a television station licensed to Vallejo, California, United States, broadcasting the Spanish-language UniMás network to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is owned and operated by TelevisaUnivision alongside San Francisco–licensed Univision outlet KDTV-DT. The two stations share studios on Zanker Road near the North San Jose Innovation District in San Jose; KFSF-DT's transmitter is located atop Sutro Tower in San Francisco.
Tripadvisor, Inc. is an American company that operates online travel agencies, comparison shopping websites, and mobile apps with user-generated content.
Angi Inc. is an internet services company formed in 2017 by the merger of Angie's List and HomeAdvisor. The company has its earliest roots in American home services website Angie's List, founded in 1995 as an online directory that allows users to read and publish crowd-sourced reviews of local businesses and contractors.
Time Inc. was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New York City. It owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake Time, Sports Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Life, Golf Magazine, Southern Living, Essence, Real Simple, and Entertainment Weekly. It also had subsidiaries which it co-operated with the UK magazine house Time Inc. UK, whose major titles include What's on TV, NME, Country Life, and Wallpaper. Time Inc. also co-operated over 60 websites and digital-only titles including MyRecipes, Extra Crispy, TheSnug, HelloGiggles, and MIMI.
Jonathan F. Miller was CEO of Digital Media at News Corp until 2012 and was the chairman and CEO of America Online from 2002 to 2006.
Qurate Retail, Inc., also known as Qurate Retail Group, is an American media conglomerate controlled by company chairman John C. Malone, who owns a majority of the voting shares.
Mindspark Interactive Network, Inc. was an operating business unit of IAC known for the development and marketing of entertainment and personal computing software, as well as mobile application development. Mindspark's mobile division acquired iOS application developer Apalon in 2014, which was known for popular entertainment applications such as Weather Live, Emoji Keypad, and Calculator Pro.
Mindy Grossman is the former CEO of WW International. The Financial Times listed her in the Top 50 Women In World Business in 2010 and 2011, and she was ranked among Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women In The World for the years 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2013. In 2014 she was ranked #22 in Fortune's Top People in Business.
HomeAdvisor is a digital marketplace that connects homeowners with local service professionals to carry out home improvement, maintenance, and remodeling projects.
Joey Levin is an American businessman, currently serving as the CEO of IAC. Levin was appointed to the position in June 2015, after previously leading the company's Search & Applications segment. In October 2022, Levin was also appointed as CEO of Angi Inc.
Angi is an American home services website owned by Angi Inc., a publicly-traded subsidiary of IAC. Founded in 1995 by Angie Hicks and William S. Oesterle, it allows users to search for contractors to provide paid home improvement work.
Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!