Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 5, 2007 | Share This |

Barry Diller today announced that IAC/InterActiveCorp, the massive conglomerate that owns search engine Ask.com, is splitting into five different but still publicly traded companies.

Read/Write Web writes that Diller will continue to run IAC, which will keep Ask, Evite, and some 30 other online properties, and the remaining companies will be Ticketmaster, HSN (the Home Shopping Network), Lending Tree, and Interval International (vacation timeshares). From the IAC press release:

“We’ve been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years. And while we’ve created a lot of value, I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors,” said Barry Diller, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC. “One of the reasons we’ve stayed with some of our more transactional businesses is that we needed their earnings to allow us to invest in emerging Internet businesses. Now that we have real scale in the pure Internet units, it makes nothing but sense to me to reorganize the whole.”

The announcement buried news that Ask.com had secured a five-year, $3.5 billion deal with Google, renewing a relationship in which Google will handle Ask’s sponsored listings - not a bad deal for fourth-place engine Ask. TechCrunch notes that “Currently, Ask.com makes up 10 percent of Google’s ad revenues from partner sites, or about $100 million a quarter. The new five-year deal assumes that will increase to $175 million per quarter. So something is working.”