Back in 1999 a husband and wife plus a friend conceived an idea based on the US website classmates.com. This idea was called Friends Reunited and was launched in July 2000 after lots of media interest in the year that followed from a base of a few thousand members the site had 2.5 million registered users. The idea of the site was to link people via their schooling, all of a sudden you could look through list of people and old mates that were at your school and see what they were now up to. When I registered I recall seeing names from my school days 14 years previously that turned on a dim lightbulb of memory from my distant past. It seems others were able to rekindle romance from previous teenage encounters and supposedly the site was a cause of numerous affairs and divorces.
Today its been announced that due to lack of active users making the sites upkeep and running non economical the site would close. An awful lot of the 2.5 million members that registered in the early days probably cant remember their sign on details and probably did not even realise the site was in existance. I personally can’t even remember how long after registering I ceased to even view the site.
So what happened to the site born in Hertfordshire? It seems that by 2005 there were around 15 million registered users; a similar site from Australia and one from New Zealand were merged into the site. ITV purchased the site for £120 million with further payments based on its performance up to 2009 which supposedly were £55 million. Quite a success story though even though its founders no doubt became miillionaires overnight its not obvious whether they had gained funding from Venture Capitalists to keep the site afloat and running one would hazard a guess of yes. Though reports suggested they recieved £30 million from the deal.
Interestingly in 2005 News Corp International bought the social network myspace for $580 million; myspace was the largest social media site in the world for the next few years.
Why did ITV acquire the site; It seems combining ITVs userbase would make the user base the 8th largest online presence of unique users which would provide attractive advertising prospects.
By 2009 things had gone sour and ITV sold the site for £25 million ITV had made a loss as a company for the previous year and advertising revenues had collapsed. Even though MySpace had a large user base the newly launched websites of Facebook ad Twitter had overtaken it in terms of users and use. ITV sold the site including Genes Reunited to a company called Brightsolid who already owned fingmypast.com which contained the census from 1901 and 1911.
After a rebranding exercise a few years back Brightsolid no longer considered the site to be integral to its business. It will now close.
Friends Reunited was a site that delivered what was misisng at the time but never really reinvented itself to compete with the multi functional new generation sites of Facebook, Bebo et al.
No visitor number have increaed substationally since the announcement. So what does it mean for the data it holds; analysts believe the data is outdated and no longer relevant as the majority of people have not kept their cotact details updated for many years. It would be a shame to see the site go offline completely and the school data lost. Perhaps it can be kept alive by an archive site. We will see.