When ITV announced that they were going to be buying Friends Reunited way back in 2005, we thought it was a terrible idea and went into some detail as to why we thought so …
We think that Friends Reunited has done an amazing sales job on ITV. It’s a site that would appear to be in decline rather than its ascendancy. Their expansion into Genes Reunited, Dating and Jobs Reunited would appear to point to them thinking the same.
Friends Disconnected
Three and a half years later, ITV finally decided that a TV station isn’t the right sort of company to be owning a social network centering around schools – especially when in the meantime social media site like MySpace and Facebook have taken over the world – strange that, isn’t it?
Friends Reunited has retained 19 million members in the UK, probably held so high as they dropped their membership charges a while back.
Having that many members is one thing, but retaining them is quite another. From their poll on their site, it doesn’t look like everyone is impressed with the site redesign with 23.6% saying they’re Not impressed at all.
Given the recent rumpus about Facebook changing their terms and conditions, Friends Reunited might also start losing members, as we noticed that they also have new Ts & Cs.
19m people is not to be sneezed at, but whether in the current economic climate ITV will get anything like the value they paid for it, we’ll have to see.
Like everyone else I know, I gave up on FU ages ago – facebook and bebo do it much better.
I can’t even remember the last time I looked at my profile – and the fact that you had to pay – PAY!! – to email a friend at first was ridiculous.
Paying for FU – Back in those days, FU was the only game in town, wasn’t it, so they could charge.
You could argue that at least they had a business model, as opposed to FB who are struggling to find one and are making mistakes, annoying their users along the way.