Barry Diller on Comparison Shopping

by Brian Smith, on September 14th, 2005

“[Comparison shopping] makes so much sense that we didn’t do it. We looked at all of them. They were for sale for anyone who would pay the price. We looked and said they do something good, but it’s boring, we don’t want to do it. I think comparative shopping is very interesting, but I think the valuation was insane. It’s a great thing, it’s just not something that I want to do. I wish them well, but not too well.”

-Barry Diller (Chairman and CEO IAC) on comparison shopping engines, addressing a group of merchants at Shop.org

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mhhfive said

what happened to Red Carpet…?

September 14th, 2005 at 10:01 pm |

Brian Smith said

Red Carpet is still very much in development according to my sources…although the company is still tight lipped. In saying the above, Diller still has an out by launching a completely new and innovative shopping comparison engine experience. I think we’ll see it integrated with IAC’s gift search engine, gifts.com. The Ask Jeeves Blog had a post yesterday (http://blog.ask.com/2005/09/compare_contras.html) about Gifts.com results showing up on Ask.com. Just something to keep an eye on.

September 15th, 2005 at 4:03 pm |

Garth Chouteau said

Make up your mind, Barry - is comparison shopping ‘boring’ or ‘very interesting’ ? And if Red Carpet is completely new and innovative, does that make it ‘very boringly interesting’ ?

September 16th, 2005 at 2:30 pm |

Vic Berggren said

>Red Carpet is still very much in development according to my sources

I agree with that and I don’t have any sources, I base it on this comment:
> wish them well, but not too well.

September 16th, 2005 at 9:46 pm |

pierre chappaz said

I have been meeting with Barry a couples of times…he has a strong personality…but I keep wondering what his vision for IAC really is. What does he really want to achieve?

Now in terms of valuation let me give you Kelkoo maths: Yahoo bought us last year for â‚¬475 M. Kelkoo will make between 25 and 30 M profit this year and still growing at more than 50% rate. Multiple is way below 20. If he really thinks that Yahoo has paid too much isn’t it because IAC own multiple is extremely low? IAC multiple is 3 times lower than any other major listed Internet company. And the reason, dear Barry, is: up to now your strategy has not been capable of convincing the markets