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Is FiLife Running On Borrowed Time?

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

  • Limiting the specific conversation around and article to those who pay to view the article makes sense while keeping the broad, newspaper-wide community free.  The discussions may also prove a tease making someone more likely to pay for the article simply to participate in the discussion.  It enables to paper to maintain an open, free platform for discussing the news of the day, while also having very specific discussions that encourage payment of subscriptions.

    Carolyn is on to a very interesting idea.  As a user I may not place much monetary value on the opinions of my peers.  But in select areas – something like finance or other specialists areas – the idea of premium access to a discussion with experts may prove to have very, very real value.

    Lenley – leveraging a tool allows them to remain strategically focused on their core competency – producing media and engaging their audiences.  They rarely leave management to another party, instead they use a tool created by a third party (whose core competency is the creation of the tool) that enables them to more effectively drive the conversations around their content.  (In full disclosure I head up ONEsite.com, the company behind My Telegraph and My Sun).

     

  • Carolyn Morgan

    I'm definitely of the opinion that the real value in the content created by media businesses is in the audience they attract and the community they can create, and this has more potential for charging.  However, think this is easier for specialist consumer and professional communities than for newspapers.  I've written on how media brands can become meeting places here: http://www.penmaen-media.co.uk/index.php/2009/11/turn-your-media-brand-into-a-meeting-place/

  • Jack Thorogood

    I love the irony of considering "putting ... Comment Is Free behind the [pay]wall"

  • viewsagent.com

    now were getting somewhere….
    interactive news, where news, blogging and interactivity flourish and evolve is the future in this sector…

  • Lenley

    It's a great idea to charge for community, and simutaneously allow specialized members to produce quality UCG for free for your more general audience.

    However, I question the strategic usefulness of allowing a third-party to completely manage your community system.

    There are high-quality frameworks like django (python), RoR (ruby) and drupal (php) that allow you to create the same systems in a fast manner and then rapidly customize to meet specific needs of your community.

    http://www.lenley.com

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