ITV ready to sell Friends Reunited

Friends Reunited is losing social networkers to rivals

ITV is likely to announce plans to sell Friends Reunited next month when it releases its annual financial results, according to a fresh wave of reports.

An ITV spokeswoman said that the company could not comment on speculation, but the social networking site has been increasingly ignored by its parent.

When ITV acquired the firm in 2005 for £120m, the strategy was to expand the ITV Consumer division to encompass mobile, broadband and other services under the directorship of Jeff Henry. But Henry stepped down at the end of last year and the broadcaster merged its online services into its main business under a new director, Peter Fincham.

ITV has shown a marked disinclination to promote the site since, and not one press release has been issued from Friends Reunited since ITV's restructuring.

In April 2008 Friends Reunited dropped its subscription model in an effort to stop users defecting to Facebook and MySpace, but current figures show that the site is still losing users to its rivals.

Friends Reunited said that its users had sent 1.8 million messages during August 2008, but Facebook recently announced that more than 15 million users update their status at least once a day.

Friends Reunited also used to claim that it was the nation's favourite social networking site for grown-ups, but Facebook's fastest growing demographic is people aged 30 years and older. Professional networking site LinkedIn, meanwhile, has also been growing in popularity among the older generation.

The news comes as ITV may have to pay another £55m for the site after already shelling out £120m to its founders in 2005. The additional cost will depend on how well the site has been performing.

Analysts have argued that it will be difficult for ITV to find a buyer for the social networking site and that, if it does, the buyer is unlikely to be from the UK.