Murphy's Law

‘Giving employees a return from the value they create is a fantastic incentive,’ adds Murphy. ‘We’d built significant revenue before we sold the business so staff did really well out of it. There were programmers on £20,000 salaries who received windfalls of £60,000.’

Murphy has stayed on to run the enlarged operation for ITV, which controls 50 per cent of the UK television advertising market.

‘Jeff Henry, director of ITV Consumer, and the rest of the management team recognise it’s best to leave us to get on with it. I think we’re lucky in that respect. I’ve seen plenty of instances where the parent company interferes so much in the vibrant business they’ve bought that two years down the line the entrepreneurial spirit has been sapped and it’s not performing – then they wonder why!’

Although Friends Reunited is being kept as a separate web presence, it’s hoped it will complement ITV.com in areas such as dating, recruitment and classifieds. ‘There are obvious synergies,’ asserts Murphy. ‘Media consumption is changing, as customers demand greater interactivity. Convergence is confusing the whole media market at the moment! Production companies are buying up online content providers, internet firms are having to constantly reinvent themselves just to stand still and online social networking is really starting to take off. Luckily, it’s a trend that plays right into the hands of Friends Reunited.’

Friends Reunited Dating, a new spin-off site launched in September 2003, is already the fifth largest dating site in the UK, with 600,000 active members looking for friends and possibly romance.

Murphy’s biggest success to date has been Genes Reunited. Representing 17 per cent of the group’s overall revenues for 2005, it has five million registered members and the names of 67 million ancestors, allowing users to trace genealogy online, exchange messages and search for relatives. ‘We bought the 1901 Family Archives consensus in August last year, and have now purchased births, marriages and deaths records. Genes Reunited will be bigger than Friends Reunited in the end,’ believes Murphy.

The most recent addition to the fold is Friends Reunited Jobs, following the purchase of TopDogJobs.com last year. Murphy is adamant about the potential and aims to make it ‘the biggest jobs site in the UK within a year.’ Industry forecasts suggest that the market for recruitment advertising online is set to grow from £99 million in 2004 to £183 million in 2009.

‘In my time here, we’ve diversified from one revenue stream to five. In 2002, the Friends Reunited core site accounted for 93 per cent of total revenue whereas last year it was 46 per cent, despite the site growing in that time. We’ve sponsored TV programmes, music CDs and have a database of millions of users, the potential of which has yet to be fully realised. I envisage a time when we’ll be developing community websites for TV shows and selling downloads. It’s a vast market to exploit, so I’m clearly going to be busy for a good while yet,’ he muses.