I have always been super skeptical how Angie's list stays in business and continues to grow competing against Yelp, Thumbtack, FindAPro, Porch, etc. Turns out I was wrong about Angie's list (sort of).
Angie's list earnings have been all over the place missing and beating, and for me was a big fat red flag.
I noticed it was increasingly easy to get memberships; I saw several groups promoting free AL memberships as a side benefit last year. Now it's free to join, apparently. Not sure if these numbers capture that shift, but loss of subscriber revenue was, apparently, a plus not a minus.
It was more useful when it was limited to paying members. I'm sure IAC sees easy profit in shifting to a "if you're not the customer, you're the product" model.
I joined because it was free now it's now been a year and they're trying to bill me for a new year. They never said it was free for only one year or they buried it in the tos. I have unsubscribed from the service I find Yelp much more useful.
The good thing about Yelp is that if you actually read through 1- and 2- star reviews for otherwise highly rated restaurants or services, you realize pretty quickly that it is the reviewer with some sort of problem, and not the service.
At least one of the brands you listed was close to buying them in 2015, but then it all fell through. Sounds like IAC was also in the process of making them an offer at that same time as well.
Angie's list earnings have been all over the place missing and beating, and for me was a big fat red flag.