Confirmed: ITV Sells Friends Reunited To Thomson DC for Mere £25 Million
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So the Friends Reunited sale saga is finally over, and the final end result is brutal: it was sold off to Dundee-based publisher DC Thomson, which owns brightsolid, which in turn owns genealogy website Findmypast.com, reports FT (Update: And confirmed by ITV (LSE: ITV) in this early-Thursday announcement). The new owners plan to combine FindMyPast with Genes Reunited, a Friends’ subsidiary, and create one of the biggest genealogy sites in the country. The other bidder was U.S. company Ancestry.com (which just filed for its own IPO) for its UK sites Ancestry.co.uk.
SEE ALSO: ITV Closing Future Technology Department; Director Simon Fell Departs
The sale came four years after ITV bought the then-high profile UK site for £170 million, among the first such buys by big media in the social media sector.
Back in March, ITV was hoping to sell it off for £60 million, but the Credit Suisse-led process obviously didn’t surface many interested buyers, in face of new fangled sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. ITV is announcing its earnings tomorrow morning, so the deal may be announced with some more details then.
For those who want to do some future-reading, could be the fate MySpace may suffer couple of years down the line, if the new team at News Corp (NYSE: NWS) is unable to turn it around. Just today, News Corp announced its Q209 earnings, and wrote off about $680 million, most of it on Fox Interactive, and had lower than expected ad revenues from MySpace.
Robert adds: Considering this deal is about the still-growing GenesReunited, rather than the whole Reunited network, even £25 million may be somewhat steep. One thing’s for sure - this must be getting close to the end of the road for FriendsReunited itself. It’s also a missed opportunity for Ancestry.co.uk, which has been steadily growing and good have benefited from Genes’ records.
Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Mergers & Acquisitions, Social Media, Companies, ITV
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