Barry Diller's master plans for a TV-internet conglomerate have failed. He announced today that he is breaking up IAC into five independent, publicly traded companies. One of the few bright spots among the five is the online advertising-media division.

The split comes as IAC was losing market value, and as Diller was having a hard time finding investors. In the wake of the announcement, the IAC stock price rose 8.5 percent.

The advertising-media arm will keep the IAC moniker. It will include Ask.com, Match.com and other online content sites. Meanwhile, the Home Shopping Network (HSN) will be spun off, as will Ticketmaster, each trading under its own name. IAC real estate sites will be folded into LendingTree. Interval International will carry the vacation home business. The new companies should be trading independently by the second or third quarter of 2008.

Diller explained of the split, "One of the reasons we've stayed with some of our more transactional businesses is that we needed their earnings to allow us to invest in emerging internet businesses. Now that we have real scale in the pure internet units, it makes nothing but sense to me to reorganize the whole."

As the HSN, Lending Tree and Ticketmaster businesses lag, Ask.com, part of the new IAC division, just closed a five-year deal with Google allowing Google to sell ads on the site. IAC predicts revenues from the deal to be in the neighborhood of $3.5 billion.