Five Buys for the Internet's New Day

This column was originally published on RealMoney on July 19 at 1:33 p.m. EDT.

News Corp.'s(NWS Quote) deal to buy Intermix Media(MIX Quote) for $540 million marks, in my view, a real sign that the Internet is entering yet another new chapter in its already multifaceted existence.

For the past decade, News Corp. has been the most disciplined of the major media companies, as it has avoided getting in over its head and buying into the hype of the Internet. Like a lot of its peers, the company dabbled in the sector in the mid-'90s, spending millions on developing Delphi, an Internet service provider. What is Delphi? That's the point.

News Corp. quickly shuttered the effort when it saw Delphi did not have the profit margins it would have hoped for. And the company never made the costly mistakes of companies such as Time Warner(TWX Quote), with its ill-fated Pathfinder and then AOL, Disney(DIS Quote), with the disastrous go.com portal, or General Electric(GE Quote), with Xoom.com and the NBCi tracking stock. ...