ITV buys Friends Reunited

ITV has bought the Friends Reunited website for £120m, with more to come if the site hits performance targets.

This amounts to a £30m payout for London couple Steve and Julie Pankhurst and their business partner Jason Porter who set up the site five years ago in a spare room.

Friends Reunited has expanded from lining up old school friends into dating and genealogy, and is one of the most visited UK websites with one million registered users and 15 million UK members.

Michael Murphy, chief executive of Friends Reunited, said: "Our priority has always been to make Friends Reunited bigger and better.

"The more people there are on the site the more friends our members will be able to reunite with, the more family they will be able to discover and the more chances of finding a soul mate or even a new job.

"When ITV approached us we immediately clicked. They share our values and they're a national institution that is trusted and well loved.

"By joining with ITV, Friends Reunited gets access to a vast audience so that we can connect even more people even more of the time."

ITV said that it would pay an additional £55m pounds in 2009 dependent on profit performance. Friends Reunited is on track for £12.4m in revenue and £6.6m in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in 2005.

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