IAC Shatters Into Five Pieces

Ticketmaster, Interval, Lending Tree, and the Home Shopping Network will be spun off IAC, leaving the group to exist as five separate publicly traded companies.

IAC will keep its Media & Advertising sectory, which includes Ask.com, and its Emerging Businesses sector, along with a handful of investments in other firms.

However, the IAC board has decided a few brands and their underlying parts will have to fend for themselves in the marketplace. Lending Tree received particular attention from IAC chairman Barry Diller during the company’s third quarter earnings announcement, as that unit suffered from the global real estate and lending slowdown.

The moves take IAC out of the mortgage, event ticketing, travel, and most shopping businesses that had been under the corporate umbrella.

"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 Diller in a statement.

Those spun-off units provided IAC with the resources it needed to invest in Internet brands, like Ask. Now that those Internet business units have begun to show "real scale" according to Diller, it became time to cut loose the other companies.