ITV close to selling Friends Reunited at £160m loss

by Daniel Farey-Jones, Brand Republic 27-Jul-09, 08:25

LONDON - Weekend reports claim ITV is close to selling its Friends Reunited website to internet entrepreneur Peter Dubens for around £15m, a £160m loss on the price it paid for the site in 2005.

The Mail on Sunday reported that Dubens' private equity firm Oakley Capital is in excusive talks with ITV.

However, in other following reports ITV sources say there are other interested parties and that they could obtain a higher price for the site.

ITV was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

The broadcaster put Friends Reunited up for sale in February with its own price tag at £60m and analysts' predictions at £40m.

The value of Friends Reunited has plummeted since ITV bought it and it was overtaken by the arrival of social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

According to recent comScore data the number of unique users on Friends Reunited has fallen from 5m three years ago to 1.7m in December.

Comments

Ehsan Khodarahmi - 27/07/2009

I'm not sure if this is a good move by ITV; however they say they want to focus on their TV business. Many people are now turning to SM and SNSs for communication and entertainment (and marketers for obviously marketing purposes; since SM is cost effective and can be targeted).

As we all know, SM is a massive growing area in which many businesses are these days investing time and effort. I am convinced that they will allocate financial resources to it [SM] too in the very near future; due to the recent successful campaigns on major SM platforms. Hence repositioning and enhancing the brand (not necessarily rebranding) is the remedy to the site owner rather than selling it with such a massive loss. Corporate organisations need to prove their presence and establish their position in SM arena; while participating actively to engage their audiences. For example not charging the ordinary SNS users for messaging each other; this doesn’t do anything other than having frustrated users...

Tim Rooke - 28/07/2009

Just shows how quickly your business can fall apart if you're not up to date with what your users want...

Ehsan Khodarahmi - 31/07/2009

You are right Tim and ITV can be a good example and even a case study - similar to Habitat which has recently become “How not to use Twitter” case study and you can see them in almost every presentations about SM.

Robert Frost - 02/10/2009

It would not take an enormous amount of work to make a friends reunited app for Facebook that lets you get back in touch with old school friends, and then Friends Reunited would be completely redundant. I would be amazed if somebody paid £15m for it. Maybe Friends Reunited can be integrated with Facebook and other social networking sites - that might make it viable in the long-run.