Diller Disses Writers Strike, Facebook, and MySpace

The writer's strike is a "dumb thing" because there is "no current economic equation" that could possibly meet the writers' demands, says IAC Corp. chief executive Barry Diller.

Speaking at the Monaco Media Forum on Monte Carlo Friday, fresh off announcing his plan to spin his IAC conglomerate into five separate companies, the former studio head said writers' attempts to pluck a few pennies out of Internet streams and DVD sales of movies and television shows makes no sense.

The only "alternative media" that makes any money is blockbuster DVD movies, he explained, so the strike is over some that "involves maybe 10 writers a year" who could add some income to "the $5 million they've already made."

Television writers have nothing to gain right now, he says, "because only one-tenth of 1 percent of TV shows become paid things on alternative media."

The writers understandably don't want to get shafted as movies and TV shows move to other formats. But Diller said they'd be better off negotiating a deal whereby the content owners share economic information with the writers' union, with an agreement to "sit down and figure out it, once economic value is being created."

The always provocative Diller also ripped into the supposed $15 billion value placed on the social networking site Facebook, an amount based on Microsoft's recent $240 million investment for 1 percent of the company.

"If it's real, it's insane," Diller said. But, he added, "it doesn't mean anything. It's a phantom. If they sell the other 99 percent of the company for $14.76 billion, then I'll believe it."

He called social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, now a property of News Corp., "a clever set of tools" that are mistakenly being regarded as media companies. He also called them "flavors."

With MySpace co-founder Chris de Wolfe in the audience, Diller said "the bloom is off the MySpace rose. People are saying 'MySpace? It's for dirty little teenies."

Voyeuristic obsession with personal Facebook pages is an understandable part of human nature, he said, even though the pages of most users are filled with "the detritus of their usually dull lives."

by Russ Mitchell

_{Photograph of Barry Diller, left, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Foursquare Conference in New York this week by Tara Todras-Whitehill.}