After spinning off the dating website operation Match Group Inc., MTCH 0.75 % one big question for Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp IACI -1.51 % has been what area the media tycoon will focus on next. The answer is digital media.  On Wednesday, the company announced the creation of IAC Publishing, a unit that will wrap together its existing properties—the Daily Beast, About.com, Dictionary.com and Investopedia—into a single operating group.  At first, the new publishing group will be made up solely of sites that had previously been part of other units within IAC. But adding to the group through acquisitions “is 100% part of the strategy,” said Doug Leeds, who will head the new group as chief executive. Previously he had served as CEO of IAC’s Ask.com.  IAC recently emerged as potential suitor for Yahoo Inc. YHOO -2.59 % ’s core Internet business if it is put up for sale. Yahoo announced earlier on Wednesday that it is shelving plans to spin off its stake in Alibaba and will instead evaluate a possible spinoff of the rest of its business.  People familiar with the matter have said IAC would be interested in exploring a possible acquisition of core Internet properties, and the newly formed publishing group would be a likely landing spot if a deal were to happen. Mr. Leeds declined to discuss specifics, but said M&A was “absolutely” in the cards.  “We built the group, with the exception of the Beast, through M&A, and I expect wholeheartedly to be acquiring more media brands for it,” he said.  The separation of Match—whose public offering was completed in November—follows a long-standing modus operandi for Mr. Diller, who is chairman of IAC. He has previously incubated companies such as Expedia Inc., EXPE -0.53 % Live Nation Entertainment Inc. LYV -1.49 % and Lending Tree Inc. under the IAC roof before spinning them off. And the creation of the new publishing unit also follows the pattern. IAC typically groups properties into one operating unit before a spinoff, as it did with its Match dating properties in late 2013.  “Having the Match IPO in our rearview, it made a lot of sense to think about what will be the next big bets for IAC, and one of them will be IAC publishing,” said Mr. Leeds.  Bringing the sites under one umbrella will allow IAC to combine their strengths, he said. For example, the expertise of About.com’s robust data science team will be applied to the other sites, as will Dictionary.com’s programmatic advertising operation and the Daily Beast’s branded content team.  “Part of this is positioning ourselves with advertisers so they will really know who we are we are and part of it is to leverage the advantages that we have,” Mr. Leeds said.  Collectively, the four companies commanded traffic of 139.9 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore Inc., SCOR -1.72 % with About.com leading the way with 68.8 million.  Initially the publishing group will operate as a separate organizational entity within IAC, but won’t immediately be broken out as a separate group for accounting purposes, although that will happen eventually, the company said. Outside of the publishing businesses, IAC also owns College Humor, Vimeo, HomeAdvisor and the Princeton Review.  Write to Lukas I. Alpert at lukas.alpert@wsj.com
Barry Diller’s IAC is creating a new publishing group as the media tycoon places his next bet on digital media after the spinoff of the Match dating businesses. The new group is expected to pursue acquisitions