Steve Pankhurst talks about the rise and fall of the UK’s first social network - Friends Reunited.

Stephen Pankhurst was the co-founder of Friends Reunited along with
his wife Julie. In 1999, Stephen’s wife Julie, was pregnant with
their first child. She had just used the internet to track down her
long lost Grandfather that she had never seen. Realising the power
of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old
school friends were up to, she came up with the idea of
FriendsReunited, exploiting a gap in the UK market following the
success of US website Classmates.com. Friends Reunited was
officially launched in June 2000. The very first version of the
site looked pretty horrible. Stephen was not a graphic designer, so
he just knocked together anything. However, the functionality
worked and very soon they started to get people coming to the site
and registering themselves against schools. Nine months later,
after a redesign, some hard work, lots of extra features,
encouragement from users and the odd mention or two in the press,
things started to get interesting. By the end of the year, it had
3,000 members, and a year later (2001) this had increased to 2.5
million. By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over 15 million
members and was bought by British TV company ITV plc for £120
million ($208 million), plus further payments of up to £55 million
based on its performance up to 2009. In 2007, ITV Chairman Michael
Grade described the site as "the sweet spot" of the internet and
stated that "Friends Reunited is one of the great undersung jewels
in the crown ... one of the most important bits of ITV going
forward, a massive presence, and profitable" That year the site
made a profit of £22 million, but its market valuation had fallen
sharply from the £120 million paid by ITV in 2005 and it achieved
growth in UK traffic of only 1.2%, compared to Facebook's 2,393%
and Bebo's 173%. In March 2008, after losing 47% of unique users in
the previous 12 months, the site dropped the subscription fee
required to contact members, but the decline continued. In 2009,
Friends Reunited was sold for £25 million to Brightsolid Limited.
By December 2011, Brightsolid estimated that Friends Reunited was
worth only £5.2 million, a fifth of the price it paid to ITV two
years previously. The company relaunched Friends Reunited in March
2012 with a new emphasis on nostalgia and memories. On January
2016, Friends Reunited revealed that it would be closing down the
website after 16 years of operation. On February 2016 the site
closed down.