| Acquired by | ITV |
| Price | $256M |
| Date | 12/05 |
| Terms | Cash |
| Website | friendsreunited.c... |
| Blog | friendsreunited.c... |
| @FR_Team | |
| Category | Consumer Web |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 7/00 |
| Description | A safe and friendly social network for g |
Identifying a gap in the UK market following the success of Classmates.com, Friends Reunited was officially launched in 2000. By the end of the year, it had 3,000 members. By February 2001 the site had 19,000 members. At the end of 2001 it had 2.5 million. In May 2003 a new service called Genes Reunited, was launched which allows people to build their family trees on line and search other people’s in the hope for matches. Friends Reunited bought and merged with Australian site SchoolFriends in 2004. By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over fifteen million members and was bought by British TV company, ITV plc, for £120m. Friends Reunited now has 12 million people registered (about half of all UK households with internet access) but most commentators believe it has lost substantial ground to sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook as the ‘millennial generation’ has grown up already ‘united’ by new technology.
