May 01, 2009, 2:15 PM — IAC CEO Barry Diller said during the first quarter conference call that his company, which owns the popular match.com personals service, is looking into taking Yahoo Personals off of new CEO Carol Bartz's hands:
We'd love to have Yahoo! Personals and I think there is some initial discussions about that, whether they're going away or not is of course enormously speculative. But I think, Yahoo! has said that it's not an absolute core asset their future and it is core to us. We're a leader in the category. So, we're very aggressive behind Match and any possibilities for increasing its future money in the world.
Match.com claims to have 15 million active members and brought in US$332 million in Q1. More important to Diller, Bartz says she wants to refocus the company to "slim down our portfolio" and concentrate on products that generate the majority of Yahoo's traffic.
Yahoo Personals' annual revenue is about $150 million, according to analyst firm Piper Jaffray. That compares to Yahoo's Q1 revenue of $1.58 billion.
