IAC (IACI) on local online ads and services (quotes from the conf call)

IAC (ticker: IACI) CEO Barry Diller talked on his Q4 results conference call about all of IAC's businesses. Here's what he said about local advertising and services:

While we believed for some time that there's a huge opportunity in local search for advertising, this is now becoming conventional wisdom. We have a head start in this space as we've been assembling the best, richest, most comprehensive local contact offering for 8 years. We have built our own excellent functioning add-serving engine. We developed the most widely used online product in restaurants and entertainment, and are expanding into other categories, most recently into home services with the acquisition of ServiceMagic. And we are integrating our efforts across our local businesses in ways that will give us real advantage.

Offers and discounts from EPI are being integrated into CitySearch, ServiceMagic's offering… is being integrated into CitySearch… and Evite has rounded out its popular service with bar and restaurant guide powered by CitySearch.

After a lot of work we believe we've turned a corner, our local merchant count is up to 116,000. CitySearch will be profitable this year. EPI's direct online sales are up 30 percent... Evite had its best quarter in history… We have very big ambitions here and we are going to have real share and real profits in years to come.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)