Friends reunited owner to tap into genealogy interest

Friends started as an online service for reuniting school friends, but in 2003 launched a sister service called Genes Reunited, which publisher DC Thomson will now run alongside its own family history site, findmypast.com.

DC Thomson's subsidiary Brightsolid said the acquisition created Britain's leading genealogy business, with Genes Reunited currently the UK's largest family history website with nine million members worldwide and over 500 million names listed.

Brightsolid chief executive Chris van der Kuyl said the firm had seen huge growth in people's interest in tracing their family history, fuelled by television programmes such as the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?

"We all have the desire to tell the story of our family and of our lives," he said. "It really is compelling and it is a great thing to do."

He said the group now plans to enhance the type of service it provides, so a person would not only be able to find long-dead relatives, but to build up stories of people they knew and the sort of place in which they lived.

While the genealogy site was the main draw for the deal, he said the firm was also keen to try to develop Friends Reunited itself.

All the sites attract older visitors, he said, and the firm wanted to develop their appeal for a more mature age group, with easy to use applications not aimed at technologically advanced youngsters.

"It would be a sensible strategy to give that market the kind of product it wants and makes them feel comfortable," he said.

Mr van der Kuyl said it was too early to say how the genealogy sites would relate to each other as the deal is still subject to competition authority approval.

"We clearly have ideas about how we can help all those brands flourish," he said.

"We aren't coming in with fixed ideas about how to consolidate."

Genes Reunited and findmypast.com run the official 1901 and 1911 Census websites respectively in association with The National Archives.

The new venture will also include ScotlandsPeople, run in partnership with General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon.

Brightsolid began life in 1995 as Scotland Online and is now a provider of IT business services to large public and private sector organisations. It acquired findmypast.com, the online family history site, in 2007.

Brightsolid has its headquarters in Dundee and has an office in London, while Friends Reunited is based in Oxted.

Friends Reunited managing director Andy Baker said the combination of the businesses would offer "something new and different to our customers".

The website suffered with the emergence of free rivals Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. It dropped its charges in May last year, but the move coincided with a sharp slowdown in advertising revenues as the recession began to brew.

Originally ITV wanted to link Friends Reunited to its ITV.com website in areas such as dating, recruitment and classifieds.

The business delivered around half of the broadcaster's £36 million online revenues in 2008.

But while members at the reunions site reached a record 6.4 million last July, revenues slumped with the loss of the subscription charge and subsequent advertising decline.

Friends Reunited was launched by husband and wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst in 2000 from a back bedroom in their suburban semi in Barnet, North London.

Mrs Pankhurst came up with the idea for the website while expecting the couple's first child because she wanted to track down old friends.

The site, a pioneer of social networking on the internet, now has 20.6 million members.