ITV to sell Friends Reunited

ITV has reportedly put struggling social networking site Friends Reunited up for sale in a bid to scale back costs.

The commercial broadcaster paid £120 million for the online friend-finding site in 2005, which has since struggled due to the rise and popularity of similar community sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Friends Reunited was originally founded by Steve and Julie Pankhurst with business partner Jason Porter in 2000, as a British equivalent to the popular US school reunion network ClassMate, and was one of the early leaders in social networking in the UK.

The site’s value reached an impressive £175 million at one point and had millions of members paying to get in contact with each other, however, a number of other free social networks such as Facebook have moved in to take its place.

User figures dropped to as low as 1.4 million before the site decided to offer its services for free less than a year ago and though the site has shown signs of recovery since then – with membership back up to more than 3 million – ITV would still have a long way to go to recoup any or all of its investment.

However, ITV is currently being forced to cut costs across the company, not invest – which has led to number of job cuts and popular programmes such as Wire in the Blood being cancelled.

The identity of a potential buyer still remains unclear, with some industry executives suggesting that ITV will struggle to find a buyer due to the state of the economy and the downward valuations of social networks in recent months.

ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com