Friends Reunited scraps subscription fees
- Added:
- Oct 29, 2007
The ITV-owned website allows users to search for old school and university friends free, but charges £7.50 for a six-month membership that allows them to message other members.
The subscription accounts for most of the site's revenues, while its rivals allow full access for free and fund their services through advertising.
ITV said it is now looking making some others features free, which could include its dating, jobs and a genealogy sites.
ITV also recently relaunched ITV.com with live-streamed video and it has been speculated that it would try to combine the ITV.com and Friends Reunited audiences.
Launched in 2000, Friends Reunited had 12m users when ITV bought the site for £120m in December 2005.
However, data from Nielsen Online put Friends Reunited at 2.1 million unique users in the UK during August 2007 , with a 7% share of the country's social network users. Facebook led the market at 20% or 6.5 million users, followed by MySpace with 6.3 million and Bebo with 4.4 million.
