Friends Reunited Sold To ITV
It is reported that ITV have bought Friends Reunited for £120 million, and would pay an extra sum of up to £55m in 2009, according to Friends Reunited's performance. With 12 million users that is £10 each, but is probably still a very good buy.
Quote:
ITV wants to link the website with ITV.com in areas such as dating, recruitment and classifieds.
- Y! MyWeb
Congratulations to the
Congratulations to the Pankhursts!
just goes to show, there are
just goes to show, there are still new(ish) ideas out there. Nice
500 server error on .co.uk
Well I've got a 500 on the .co.uk at the moment. Not bad for £120 million!
Classmates in the USA was
Classmates in the USA was around for longer than Friends Reunited - why didn't they launch a UK version I wonder?
I wrote to the guy
I wrote to the guy (friendreunited)about 2 years ago and asked if he wanted to do one for central europe and they told me to go and jump in the lake ( politely). There is still many countries this has not been done in.
BTW I was there the other day and there was friendsreunitedjobs etc etc. I thought it was pretty cheesy and showed a lack of focus. He must have sold at the right time.
lack of focus
Quite agree re the 'jobs' thing. The school thing was brilliant ... and everyone knows the year they left school (unless there's been a lot of heavy alcohol abuse since). Got the feeling they were then trying to make fit an idea that didn't quite (fit that is). FR was just beautifully simple. I'm interested to see how ITV try to monetise this. Apart from it being simply a mailing list (with date protection problems) are they going to mine this for programme ideas and participation ... or is it just a cash stream.
They integrated the job
They integrated the job function not long ago (it's still semi-beta) - they bought over a job board (topdogjobs I think) for the backend system and data to power their job function.
Lot's of potential for a media company to use this - even the exposure from advertising their products is worth a lot, let alone the existing revenue, data and research potential.