General Chat

In the news today

ITV 'eyes up Friends Reunited' ITV boss Charles Allen is keen to diversify as ad revenues are weak Broadcaster ITV is hotly tipped to be nearing a takeover deal for Friends Reunited, the website which brings together old school friends. According to press reports, ITV is examining the company's books and could sign a deal as early as this week with an estimated price tag of £120m. If an agreement is signed, husband and wife founders Steve and Julie Pankhurst could net about £30m between them. ITV and Friends Reunited declined to comment on speculation about a deal. The website has more than 12 million registered users and profits have ballooned as the business expanded to offer genealogy and internet dating services as well. Branching out Created by the merger of Carlton and Granada last year, ITV controls more than half of the UK television advertising market. It is believed that Friends Reunited has attracted strong interest from traditional media companies keen to develop more platforms in order to bolster sagging advertising revenues. BT, News Corporation and Daily Mail & General Trust are also rumoured to be in the running to bid for Friends.

Beat me to it Bob!!! I read that on teletext just now!! Just hope they don't put adverts on here too, slow enough site as it is!!!!! lol :0) Joan

Never have i seen a company so overvalued/misvalued prior to sale. The value is based on the information we all supplied,Genes merely provide the mechanism to share it-talk to any website provider /designer and they could set up such a network for thousands,not millions. The site and any success it gains has been the result of all us entering information that we paid for in time and money in research site subscriptions,and the reputation built up by individuals giving up their time and money to volunteer help to others-Genes havent paid anyof us to provide this help. They have simply ponced off us,and are cashing us in. If people withdrew their volunteered help,and kept their tree on a disc elsewhere,this site would not even be worth one million,never mind 120. If the true stats re the names enterd on the database were known,ie more likely to be less than 20 million,not 43 million,due to a lot of bogus and multiple entries,and entries relating to members no longer active on this site,would the value have been reassessed???

If you read this and thought - 'So what!' Then read the following extract from the terms and conditions to which we all agreed when we signed up: 'By submitting any material to the content to the Genes Reunited Service, you: are representing that you are fully entitled to do so; grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, non-terminable licence to copy, modify, distribute, show in public and create derivative works from that material in any form, anywhere; and authorise us to adapt the relevant material in the course of doing so, and so waive your moral rights to object to any derogatory treatment, or to be identified as the author, of the material in question.' Bob

Evening all. I saw this news item on the bbc website today. I agree with one member who said it is the members who make the site. If ITV end up buying it i feel a lot will change including membership price. I havent been a member that long, but it has made my family tree searching worth every second and its all down to the great people on this site. Thanks one and all and lets hope if the owners do sell then we dont get sold also. deb :-)

How on earth can there be 12 million registered users? I know of one family alone that somehow have 12 accounts with this site,but only one of the family actually uses the site!! Try any name search and very soon youll see exactly the same entries multiplied many times by the same tree owner.

Alter Ego The Company may be overvalued but I can't agree FR or GR have ponced on us if I thought that I wouldn't be still a member, for the price of a year's subscription I think it's good value. I haven't been as successful as a lot of others but I have found distant rellies in NZ and West Midlands which I never thought would happen and may never have happened if I hadn't been a member of this site :-) I agree with you Lynda ;-) I wish I had come up with the idea really it's a simple one nearly all the most successful and best ideas are simple ones. I would not begrudge the Pankhursts their money and wish them well in their future. Pat x

Good luck to them, yes if we all pulled our trees then it would be worth nothing, but who is going to. I have found lots of connections and have found another definate today, just hoping they reply. I access this site through kiwisreunited and no adverts whatsoever, no macromedia popups, just the basics of the site. Ros.

People pull their trees daily on this site and it makes not one jot of difference to the alleged number of Ancestors showing on the Site.If we all left en masse, our trees would remain. Yep, wish I'd thought of the idea first - however, I find I am increasingly dismayed at what appears to me to be misrepresentation - the 'blurb' about this Site SUGGESTS that if you join, you will be able to 'research' - in fact, you cannot do any primary research on here, other than to connect to other members. As Alter so rightly says, any information on here is supplied by other members and we have all PAID for that privilege. GR is a bit like a Village Hall - you pay a fee and they hire you a room to meet with like-minded people. The only facility they provide is hooks to hang your tree on!(And sometimes the hooks fall off the wall....) No matter who does, or doesn't buy this Site, nothing will change for the better. It is being sold as a Financial Asset, not a genealogy site, and if it can be valued at so many millions in its present less-than-perfect state, why would any purchaser wish to spend any money on it? The reason I stay on this Site is for the invaluable help which I have received from the other members, and the good laughs I get, though not as often as I used to. Olde Crone

Any site we agree to the terms?? Good luck to them i say. Ive found loads of rellies and friends via both sites and im grateful. Donna

good luck to steve and julie they fully deserve their success susie

Good luck to them both, without them I would never have found family and made so many friends. Well done to you both..........

Strange isn’t it – When there has been a minor change on this site (like the colour) it has generated vitriolic criticism. I thought that the prospect of this sale would have had our more militant members taking to the streets. I do not begrudge for a moment the success of the Pankhursts. They worked damned hard for it. Good luck to them. I was just trying to bring to the attention of the membership the possibility that if a media company like ITV buys the site (and yes they will own our trees too) they will want to exploit every opportunity they can devise to create revenue. The list of members alone is worth a great deal of money to any company selling into the genealogy market. I am no expert but I bet there are loads of ways that money can be made that the Pankhursts rejected or never thought of. For my part I am paid up to August 2006 so I will review the situation then. I expect that the whole site will have experienced considerable upheaval by then. Whether it is for the better? I will reserve judgement. Bob

Not to happy about the idea of ITV taking over, the pages will end up all ads, and how does one remove ones tree from the site? I'll be keeping an eye on things and if this site starts looking a bit dodgy then I wont be renewing. Talking about renewal, I had my renewal down for yearly renewal but when I checked it had become continuous, wonder how that happened???????????? Len Ps Agree with Susan, didnt put my details on here for someone to make money out of them

I took my tree off a while back now. Hardly ever had any enquiries anyway. I can't see how things will stay the same when it's sold. I think there will be a lot of changes.

To be honest, I'm not bothered if anyone who buys Gr can use my tree. I'm not even bothered if the subs go up. Id happily pay more than the tiny amount I do now. As for ads..I have an ad blocker from Norton, never see the ads anyway ! Elaine x

I am fairly sure that even if you remove your tree, the names you have entered remain - just no longer in tree form but in Name Search. (I am ready to be corrected on this point, if anyone knows different?) If this is not the case, then why do the numbers only go up, never down? And has anyone ever counted to see if there are actually 45 million names on this Site? ITV will not care one way or the other about this point; as I said before, they are buying it as a Financial venture, not because they have a burning interest in Genealogy. I shall probably continue with my membership if it stays at more or less the same rate. However, anymore dancing adverts will probably be the death of me. I too have Norton Antivirus, but it doesnt stop the adverts on this site. When I instructed it to remove all cookies, I couldnt get on the GR Site! Olde Crone

Perhaps we will get adverts between every thread lol! Dx

saw this on news this morning are they trying to scare us all again as said before these company's are only trying to buy for proffit so where do the members stand?? the members need to know whats happening with all this uncertanty people will start to leave is this what they want. Josieanne