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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 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.  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

  • Another Best example of this concept is www.isocial.in It’s a social commerce network script helps people stay together for common community support .

  • Danny Bull

    Its interesting to see another venture, like us at My Neighbourhoods (http://www.myneighbourhoods.co.uk/), not solely concentrating on local news, which is what people focus on when talking about hyperlocal. Quite rightly, the power and tools should be given to the people in order to decide how hyperlocal takes shape.

  • Josh Becerra

    Another great example of this concept is www.buythechange.com - currently in BETA.  It's a local social commerce network that garners community support by giving up to 50% of it's gross revenue back to non-profits as chosen by it's members.

  • Cptn

    We've been trying to get people engage in community blogging for three years on the People's Republic of South Devon, with varying degrees of success.

    It will be interesting to see if the power of the Daily Mail can convince people to contribute.

    Also, it will be interesting to see how it fits in with Northcliffe's South West stable, including their What's on South West and the Plymouth Herald's own social network site iHerald.

    We're now going the route of experimenting with crowd sourcing, to see what success that can bring in terms of community stories.

    Hopefully, the Daily Mail initiative will highlight some of the possibilities of the hyper-local world.

    Here was our initial reaction:
    http://www.peoplesrepublicofsouthdevon.co.uk/2009/06/29/daily-mail-follows-prsd-into-hyper-local-world-of-south-devon/

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