Barry Diller Quotes

You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising.

The world is changing. Networks without a specific branding strategy will be killed. I envision a world of highly niched services and tightly run companies without room for all the overhead the established networks carry.

We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.

What I've learned over the years is that focus and singular purpose is the best approach for businesses.

I'm never absolutely sure of anything, and I don't want to be. You're either right and you'll pull through, or you're not. We're never going to be right about everything, and we've certainly been wrong.

I've not conducted my life in the service of smallness.

I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid.

Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth.

I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law.

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.

The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.

The American public tunes in every night hoping to see two people screwing. Obviously, we can't give them that but let's always keep it in mind.

I never thought I was a very good manager.

Now along comes the potential creative destruction brought by a different distribution methodology, the Internet.

The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.

I've always said AOL is great opportunity for somebody.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

All forms of commerce are adversarial.

Well, the Internet is this miracle. It is an absolutely extraordinary idea that you can press a send button, and you are publishing to the world.

We need an unambiguous rule - a law - that nobody will step between the publisher and the consumer, full stop.

Ticketmaster does not set prices. Live Nation does not set ticket prices. Artists set ticket prices.

Facebook's the real deal. Nobody can buy Facebook now. Everybody has taken an angle at it. But Facebook may be the place that organizes everybody's personal information. It's got a very good chance of being that.

Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course-correct as you go.

We want to be able to sell you anything, anywhere, any time you want it.

This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful.

If you have too many epiphanies, you're on some kind of drug.

It's not that you don't want to earn as much money as you can - it is your obligation, of course - but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday's game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in.

The ability for consumers to receive broadcast over the air signal is their right.

The entertainment business hasn't had a new idea in years.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

People have paid for content. They always have.

No one can solve an issue where there is no economic model yet.

My opinion, young people go to the Internet. To the Internet distribution system right now, you put it up there and it's accessed by the world.