The Guardian
topics

Exclusive
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.

Related Stories
Staci D. Kramer
@sdkstl Mar 19, 2010 11:15 PM ET

Hourglass

Share

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

  • Hi Oracle and Robert, I just wanted to respond to your comments. First off, I contacted Gameloft's PR, and they said they have not had any layoffs in the last month, and that their headcount remains at around 4,000 worldwide. They added: "In fact, we are one of the only publishers that are still recruiting."

    As for marketshare, yes, EA has been at the top for some time. We wrote about the top publishers in Q2 here: http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-nielsen-mobile-ranks-top-five-mobile-games-publishers-for-q2

    And, as far as the iPhone being a new opportunity, it definitely is, but I don't think the mobile game industry is out of the woods yet. There's still a lot of issues to be worked out. It's costly to develop a game because they have to share revenues with so many people in the value chain, not to mention support many handsets. That's the beauty with the iPhone. Will that change? Maybe. Other players like Google are changing things, as well…

    Hope that helps,
    Tricia

  • Oracle

    greedy carrier’s around the world thats the problem - uninspiring titles from the big two publishers. The 100th jump´n run from gameloft isnt attracting consumers.

    Who is Nr.1 or Nr.2? No one really knows cause fact is on which platform. Gameloft figures shows clearly that without iphone if its their nr.1 partner in the moment they will have a bad quarter. iphone is saving their asses. gameloft as well as ea having problems in their cost structures!

    But the biggest problems are and will be the operators that dont realize that everyone needs to make money not only getting money.

    open up the market for every publisher and let the consumer chose what is good and you will see a good market. Why is the iphone market so interesting? An interesting business model for the content owner PLUS everyone can provide content for it. At the operator only EA and Gameloft are fighting for the topslots.

    Doomed industry? not really just having tons of challenges that need to take care of it.

  • Robert

    how much revenue comes from DS, wii, and xbox live?

    is gameloft #2 mobile game provider in the world or would be #3 if you remove all the extra platforms?

    Does anyone knows how many studios they have closed in this quarter after the financial crises. There are many gossips in the industry that they layoff more then 200 employees around the world in the last month. Can anyone confirm?

    Gamelfot claimed last quarter they were #1 game provider in the world, but they are not even close of the $47 mil that EA reported last week or the 24% growth compared to the 9% above.  Are the French bad in revenue predictions or the financial crises already took its toll on them as well?

    Is the mobile industry doomed cause of bad business models or greedy carrier's around the world?

Covering the UK’s Digital Media Economy | paidContent:UK Newsletter

Know something we don’t?

Send Us a News Tip

All tips are anonymous and untraced.

Sponsors

Contributors