ITV has sold its Friends Reunited business to Brightsolid, a subsidiary regional newspaper publisher DC Thomson, for £25m just four years after buying it for more around £170m.
Friends Reunited was acquired by ITV in 2005, five years after it launched, for an initial £120m and performance-related top ups worth in excess of £50m.
However, the sale is for more than had been predicted earlier this week when some suggestions put the sales figure closer to £15m.
The assets of Friends Reunited, including a dating website, genealogy business and social networking platforms will all pass to Brightsolid, an independent provider of IT business services.
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Parent company DC Thomson is one of the largest privately owned media groups in the country, publishing of Beano along with regional newspapers, the Press and Journal and the Sunday Post.
It be particularly interested in Genes Reunited which it will link with its findmypast.com sites.
Genes Reunited was launched in 2003 and is currently the UK’s largest family history website with 9m members and claims to have over 500 million names listed.
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The transaction is subject to approval by the competition authorities.
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