Federation Of Family History Societies

brightsolid acquires Friends Reunited

brightsolid today announced it is to acquire Friends Reunited Group from ITV plc for £25 million. The completion of the deal is subject to clearance by the competition authorities.

brightsolid is a fast growing online innovation business owned by DC Thomson, one of the largest privately owned media and publishing groups in the country. A key part of brightsolid’s strategy is developing destinations for “people and places” on the internet.

Friends Reunited is the original social network with 20.6 million members. It was launched in 2000 to put old school friends back in touch with each other and swiftly became a British media phenomenon. Sister site Genes Reunited was launched in 2003 and is currently the UK’s largest family history website with 9 million members worldwide and over 500 million names listed.  Together with Friends Reunited Dating, the group attracts three million unique users per month.

The acquisition of Friends Reunited Group would create Britain’s leading genealogy business by bringing together Genes Reunited and findmypast.co.uk (which operate the official 1901 and 1911 Census websites respectively in association with The National Archives) and ScotlandsPeople in partnership with General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon.

Chris van der Kuyl, CEO brightsolid, said: “We see the acquisition of Friends Reunited Group as an exciting opportunity to provide new focus for and build on the iconic status of the Friends Reunited brands. Between them these brands attract over three million unique users per month. This also marks another step forward in the future strategy of brightsolid, widening its offering to the consumer marketplace, in particular by creating Britain’s leading genealogy business.”   

brightsolid

brightsolid began life in 1995 as Scotland Online and is a leading UK independent provider of IT business services to large public and private sector organisations.

brightsolid helps its clients to design and implement high volume, high availability, high performance online products and services. It has done this successfully since the mid 1990s when it became one of the pioneering internet companies of the time.  brightsolid has two divisions, online publishing and online technology.

In 2007, brightsolid acquired findmypast.co.uk, an online family history site.  findmypast.co.uk was the first website to put the complete birth, marriage and death indexes for England and Wales online.  The company also successfully launched ancestorsonboard.com, the online passenger lists records resource, for The National Archives in January 2006. It included details of over 24 million travellers, including the historic details of the Titanic’s maiden voyage.  brightsolid recently launched the group’s first, and Scotland’s only, online magazine ‘Discover My Past Scotland’.

Headquartered in Dundee, the company is owned by the publishers D.C. Thomson and has offices in Edinburgh and London.

www.brightsolid.com

6 August2009