Barry Diller‘s IAC has formed a new publishing group that will combine The Daily Beast and About.com, the company said Wednesday. The move aims at luring advertisers with a new reach of more than 100 million monthly users.
Doug Leeds, the former head of Ask.com, has been tapped as CEO of the newly formed IAC Publishing.
“We are intensifying our focus in digital publishing at IAC,” Leeds said in a statement. “We have been operating these businesses independently and figured there’s a lot more we can do when we aggregate this scale.”
IAC confirmed the publishing group would not spin off into a separate company. In addition to the advertising possibilities for The Daily Beast, Leeds expressed excitement over analytics that would spring forth users in IAC’s diverse media portfolio — which also includes Vimeo, CollegeHumor, HomeAdvisor and its dating sites Tinder, Match.com and OkCupid.
“We’ve built great brands, but across that is an opportunity to use things like data to better connect advertisers and the readers who access (these sites),” Leeds told CNBC.