Bronte Media

There are not many online businesses that have scale (>$100m in annual revenue) and are growing 30% year on year. ServiceMagic is one such business and is emerging as the jewel in the crown of the recently remade InterActive Corp.

Revenue at ServiceMagic rose 30% to $43.9m in Q309, driven by an 18% year over year increase in customer growth and a 22% increase in leads to nearly 1.5m service requests.

Compare this to CitySearch, another IAC business that garners most of the ‘local’ attention: “Citysearch’s revenue decline reflects a difficult display advertising environment and was compounded by transitional issues related to the relaunch of the site and the integration of a new ad serving platform.”

CitySearch’s revenue is not broken out, primarily because it’s not material and secondarily because IAC probably doesn’t want to dispell the market leadership myth.

ServiceMagic is now doubling down on growing their sales force, expanding overseas and (somewhat worringly) spending more on marketing per service request/lead.

Diller also mentioned that he would be open to selling Ask. Long time readers know that I have been critical of Diller because he buys a lot of businesses but does not sell them and that he would make more money by adopting a private equity model instead of a publicly-listed conglomerate. I also predicted that MSN would end up buying ASK back in February of last year.

The problem is that at the moment he probably wont get that great a price. Even so, the future for Ask is significantly poor that he should unload it.

Interestingly, if you consider Dating ‘local’, what would be left is the largest online local company with a shit-load of cash ($1.8bn+Ask proceeds).

P.S. What is up with all these investor relations vendors like Shareholder.com that can’t even fucking publish the earnings calls in a flash audio widget and instead offer Real Audio and Windows Media feeds!?