Brightsolid Limited has bought Friends Reunited from ITV for £25 million just four years after the television company purchased the website for £120 million.
The new owner of what was one of the first social media sites is a genealogy group owned by DC Thomson, the firm that publishes children's comic The Beano.
A deal for the portal was apparently struck in the early hours of this morning and it happened shortly after ITV had announced its latest financial results.
The statement indicated that the group made a loss of £105 million during the first half of 2009.
Explaining the loss from the sale of Friends Reunited, ITV chief executive Michael Grade told the Times that it "was the best price we could get", before adding: "The market has changed dramatically ... there's a bit of a recession on."
Friends Reunited, which was launched in 2000, has 20.6 million members but has lost users since the inception of other social media portals such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace.
Indeed, market research firm comScore recently announced that Facebook gained 24 million unique visitors in June and now has the fourth highest traffic count in the world with 340 million unique visitors across the globe.
