With eye on Web, CBS makes key hire

Last week, CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves told Wall Street that his team was sniffing around for up-and-coming Internet properties to buy, preferably on the cheap.

“We’re not going to buy YouTube,” Moonves said, referring to the wildly popular video-sharing website that Google Inc. agreed to acquire last month for $1.65 billion. “But it’s not a bad idea to buy the next YouTube.”

Today, CBS is expected to announce that it has hired a 35-year-old investment banker, Quincy Smith, to find the “next YouTube.”

“I appreciate the pressure,” Smith said with a chuckle during an interview. The company named him president of its newly created CBS Interactive division.

The move demonstrates that CBS, which is sitting on a stockpile of $3 billion in cash, is eager to make acquisitions to better position itself in digital media.

“CBS is a great platform, and with that kind of money, they can really do some damage,” said Blake Krikorian, chief executive of Sling Media, maker of the Slingbox, which allows consumers to stream content from their home television set onto the Web and receive it in a remote locale. “Quincy is going to make a big difference,” he added.

Smith helped broker several deals during his tenure at investment-banking firm Allen & Co., including last year’s $160-million sale to Viacom Inc. of Neopets, a website that allows people to invent “virtual” pets, and AOL’s acquisition of advertising.com. Before joining Allen & Co., a boutique specializing in media deals, Smith was a founding partner of a venture capital firm headed by former Netscape CEO James Barksdale.

Smith’s relationships and Silicon Valley experience -- he worked five years at Netscape -- should help him bridge the gap between the freewheeling, entrepreneurial spirit of technology start-ups and the buttoned-down culture of CBS, which got its start before the Great Depression with 16 radio stations, people who know him say.

Smith said that his deal-making background “doesn’t mean that we’re going to be all acquisitions all of the time.” He also wants to exploit CBS’ vast library of old sitcoms and dramas or even snippets of old celebrity interviews from “Entertainment Tonight.”

These days, media companies, including CBS, are scrambling for Internet assets to hold on to their share of advertising revenue. That’s becoming more challenging as corporate ad dollars migrate to the Internet and away from traditional media outlets such as TV and radio stations.

Not lost on Moonves is that in September, his boss, Sumner Redstone, fired former Viacom Chief Executive Tom Freston, blaming him for the cable programmer’s sluggish move to the Internet. Redstone singled out Viacom’s failure to buy social-networking site MySpace before rival Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. swooped in and acquired it.

Last week, CBS announced that it was part of a group that invested $40 million in Spot Runner Inc., which uses the Internet to create low-cost ads.

Smith helped broker the deal, in which Allen & Co. is also an investor.

Smith will report directly to Moonves in a restructuring that will see Larry Kramer step down as president of CBS Digital Media.

Kramer, who has been in charge of CBS’ Internet operations for two years, will stay on as an advisor. He said the move made sense because CBS “has a hunger to grow things quickly.”

“This is exactly the right thing for the company to do, and he is the right man for the job,” Kramer said. “Quincy has got real enthusiasm for where the business can go.”

Kramer added that he was proud of his stewardship, organizing CBS’ scattered Internet assets and helping the company’s executives adapt their operations to make better use of the medium.

“It’s amazing how far we’ve come,” Kramer said. “We’re a division now, and a profitable operation. But it’s been an exhausting two years.”

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meg.james@latimes.com