Dave Kansas Out at Dow Jones-IAC Finance Site FiLife
FiLife, the personal finance site co-owned by IAC (IACI) and Dow Jones, has a new boss. The company has brought in Ezra Kucharz, formerly an executive at online games company Oberon Media and at NBC’s iVillage, as president.
He replaces Dave Kansas, a business news veteran. Kansas will stay on as an editor-at-large and has a personal finance book due out in January.
FiLife, which is supposed to be geared toward young folks who spend more time browsing the Web than looking at their 401(k), has had a short but troubled existence. It finally launched in June, after more than a year of fits and starts. It was originally supposed to have lots of blog-like entries from professional writers, and eventually moved into a more service-oriented comparison shopping engine for financial products.
You could argue that economic turmoil could make a site like this particularly valuable for its target audience, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Compare the performance of the site with Consumerist.com, a Gawker Media blog that’s now up for sale.
Full disclosure: Dow Jones is a unit of News Corp. (NWS), which also owns this Web site. If you’d like even more disclosure, see here.
Comments
Turn up the pressure, Peter. FiLife has always been a business deal done by Diller and Fisher looking for a purpose. IAC went through a strange deal making period in which JV’s were the structure de jeur. 236.com is but another example. That a finance blog launched years after its original conception demonstrates a mental wanking process of the worst kind. And now, the site looks like a deadbeat SEO outpost.
Posted by Jonathan Marcus at November 19th, 2008 at 11:49 pm