ITV will take over online sales from eType, a subsidiary of Media Initiatives Group, on June 1. ITV bought Friends Reunited in December for £120m and an additional £55m if performance targets are hit by 2009.
Michael Murphy, Friends Reunited chief executive, said it made commercial sense to bring online sales under direct ITV management, in the same way as marketing, site development, customer service and PR.
"EType has been with us from the early days and the team there have done a fantastic job growing ad sales revenue over the past five years.
"This is the only area we've ever outsourced and now, with the sale of Friends Reunited to ITV, it makes commercial sense to bring the expertise in house," Murphy said.
Media Initiative Group's Alan Greaney said the takeover was testament to the work done by eType in making Friends Reunited a premium online brand. EType's clients include The Independent and National Rail Enquiries.
As part of the acquisition of Friends Reunited, ITV integrated its management team, led by Murphy, with ITV.com and ITV local management teams to bring together the group's online expertise and push ITV's online offering.
The deal gave the combined sites of ITV.com and FriendReunited.com, the eighth largest online presence in the UK in terms of unique users, ranking behind Google, Yahoo!, eBay and the BBC.
Member community sites such as Friends Reunited now attract over half of the UK internet population every month, according to a recent study published by Nielsen//NetRatings. In the UK, Friends Reunited is the most popular member community with more than 1.8m visitors each month.
It is numbers like this that helped convinced ITV to pay £120m for Friends Reunited, and News Corporation to pay a whopping $580m for US community website MySpace.com.
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