IAC is laying off a third of Investopedia staff

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IAC is laying off a third of Investopedia staff

Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp and Expedia, Inc., rides a bike during the first day of the annual Allen and Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho July 8, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Thomson Reuters

Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC.

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InterActiveCorp - the holding company behind OKCupid, Vimeo, The Daily Beast, and more - plans to lay off about one third of the staff at Investopedia, according to a regulatory filing Friday.

In a New York State WARN notice dated July 31, the company said the firing of 36 of the financial encyclopedia's 96 employees was due to economic reasons and that the employees were not unionized.

IAC's stock price was down about 0.4% in pre-market trading Friday.

In an email to Business Insider, Neil Vogel, CEO of IAC brand Dotdash, said the layoffs were due to Investopedia's merger with the former About.com brand.

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"Investopedia has joined the Dotdash family of brands, bringing together two of the fastest growing scaled properties online, with revenue up 50 and 60 percent respectively for the first six months of the year," he said. "With Investopedia's audience of financial professionals and students and The Balance's audience of millennials and women, Dotdash has created a clear market leader in the finance space and is well positioned to serve a broad range of consumers and financial advertisers. Though it's always difficult to say goodbye to colleagues and friends, these changes allow us to increase our focus on our core media businesses and better position the company for the future."

Shares of IAC have risen 41% since the beginning of 2018, fueled by solid bets on dating apps and sites like Tinder, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, and more. It has since spun many of those, including Tinder, to Match Group, in which IAC has a roughly 22% stake.

Investopedia saw a massive influx of traffic to its site, especially its explanatory pages about cryptocurrency and blockchain, amid the bitcoin mania in early 2017, its CEO David Siegel told Business Insider in January. At the time, he compared the hype surrounding bitcoin and other alt-coins to the dot com bubble of the 1990's.

This story was originally published by Investopedia.

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