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Wednesday, May 28, 2003 |
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Growing an oligopoly on the Web? Barry Diller, whom we've noted in connection with the media oligopoly and with the sale of Vivendi Universal, is putting together an e-commerce-oriented company called USA Interactive, ready to establish his company as one of the future oligopolies of the online market. He sold the TV and motion picture parts of his USA Networks, but he continues to focus on the Internet. While the hype about the Internet has cooled substantially, there are real moneymakers online. Thanks to the post-bubble fear of investing in e-commerce, Diller has managed to snatch up some significant pieces at reasonable rates. His new online empire, according to a recent BusinessWeek article, "has higher revenue than eBay and Yahoo! and is second only to Amazon.com." The company's 2003 revenues are expected to surpass $3 billion. The e-commerce enterprises that make up the USA Interactive portfolio are:
As the article points out "In building his company, Diller is mimicking media giants, which often cherrypick businesses, and some of the most successful retailers, who now run portfolios of specialty stores instead of department stores." All of Diller's properties attract people who spend money, not just pass through on the Net. Is it possible to create an oligopoly on the Web? After all, the Web is the wide-open territory, available to anyone who can plunk down ten dollars a month for site hosting and get some HTML-spewing adolescent to create a few Web pages. We believe strongly that the contest on the Web is not one for shelf space or real estate, but rather one for mind space. Mind space is created by top-rate marketing, and that's how USA Networks is proceeding. 7:42:19 PM 
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Last update: 9/4/2007; 8:52:41 PM .
