Alan Meckler, CEO, INT Media Group Inc.

Barry Diller, CEO of USA Networks and owner of various Web sites including Ticketmaster.com, was interviewed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday. If the interviewer got it right, then Diller believes everything that I have been preaching.

The main thrust of the interview was that a solid media company of the future will be one that integrates and leverages both online and offline assets. Do not forget that it was Diller who tried to buy Lycos in 1999 only to have Dave Wetherell, CEO of one-time Internet incubator CMGI, kill the deal (and isn't it ironic that Dave Wetherell's whole Internet philosophy has been shot to pieces!?).

Diller was a trailblazer by going for Lycos several years ago and obviously, he is even a greater believer today in having a mix of online and offline assets.

And this leads me to some deals that were announced late last week in which great distribution Web site assets/ and or companies are being picked off for pennies on the dollar by powerful offline companies.

The first one to note is the purchase by United Airlines of Mypoints.com. (Go back to 1996 or so and think of the bet you could have had on United Airlines paying reasonably large dollars for a Web site.) United, of course, wanted the email newsletter subscribers, databases and general content that Mypoints owned because these readers are interested in all things travel.

Next look at BellSouth buying a portion of Starmedia.com --- it appears they paid $25 million cash for about 11 percent of the company. Why? It would appear BellSouth feels that they can sell phone services to Starmedia's latino readership both in the USA and in Latin America. I doubt that BellSouth would ever want to own Starmedia, but they now have an inexpensive way of gaining access to millions of potential buyers without having the financial onus of Starmedia's horrendous profit and loss statement.

Finally, we have TMP Worldwide, the parent company of Monster.com, buying Flipdog.com on the cheap to make their dominance in the online jobs area even stronger. Earlier, Monster purchased a European-based online tech job site called Jobline.com for $115 million in stock. I think the folks at Monster figured that the cost of the company was much cheaper by miles than what it would have cost them to try to compete with their own entry in Europe.

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These aforementioned deals are coming more frequently. Part of the Diller interview touched on this very subject as he indicated that he was now hunting to make the right and cheap online purchases that fit best with his various offline and online properties.

Hungry Minds.com

I happened upon a talk this week by the CEO of Hungry Minds. John Kilcullen was the guy behind the creation of "The Dummy" series of books which is now one of many booklines that Hungry Minds owns. John was talking to the board of the New York University Publishing Center about leveraging offline and online assets.

I was particularly taken by the information he gave about how they were using online e-mail newsletters to grow the conventional book publishing business. Presently, Hungry Minds is delivering one million e-mail newsletters today to opt-in subscribers on a range of topics.

I have been a huge fan of email newsletters and Hungry Minds is a great example of how to take this medium and leverage it toward greater promotion and sales. If you have time, take a look at the site and see what I mean --- particularly what they are doing with their Frommer's line of travel books. (I must put in a plug here to say that internet.com is running a two-day E-mail Newsletter Tactics seminar in Reston, Virginia on June 14-15 that deals with much of what Hungry Minds is doing so effectively---go to the internet.com home page and click events for more information).

There is terrific money in e-mail newsletters. In fact, DoubleClick purchased MessageMedia this week for $41 million to enhance their menu of e-mail newsletter services. DoubleClick will now be delivering over 700 million e-mail newsletters per week as a result of this deal.

I suggest that we all watch the email newsletter space as it will be the hottest area in the Internet world in the coming months.

*Alan Meckler, the CEO of atNewYork's parent company, writes a weekly column for atNewYork. To view past commentaries, go to http://www.atnewyork.com/views. He enjoys and responds to feedback. Send to atnewyork@internet.com