Shortly after the ebullient Michael Grade took the helm at ITV, he was asked for his views on Friends Reunited, the social networking website that had cost his predecessor £175 million.

“The likes of Facebook are very successful, but they’re trendy,” he said. “They’re cool today, but somebody will be cooler tomorrow. They’ll be dead in the water. Friends Reunited will always be there.”

Yesterday, however, his pronouncement rang hollow and Mr Grade was doing his best to distance himself from the decision to buy the website as ITV offloaded it for a comparatively meagre £25 million.

The episode has proved to be a cautionary lesson in the rapid pace at which the digital media world can change. In 2005, when ITV, then under the leadership of Charles Allen, flashed the cash to land the brand, only the most avant-garde British internet users had heard of Facebook. The broadcaster’s acquisition made multimillionaires of Steve and Julie Pankhurst, who created Friends Reunited in the spare room of their semi-detached house in Barnet, North London.

Today Facebook has 200 million users, compared with the three million who use Friends Reunited each month. To add insult to injury, Brightsolid, the company that pulled off the deal at 5.01am yesterday, hours before ITV unveiled its latest financial results, said that it was buying Friends Reunited only to get its hands on Genes Reunited, the sister site that deals with family histories. Chris van der Kuyl, chief executive of Brightsolid, said: “We know Genes Reunited very well. The fact that we could grab it excited us.”

Another source was more explicit. “We’ve paid the money for Genes Reunited. The value put on Friends Reunited was nominal.”

A tetchy Mr Grade, who once described Friends Reunited as “one of the great undersung jewels in the crown ... one of the most important bits of ITV”, insisted that he was not to blame for the £150 million loss. “ITV bought it; this management team did not buy it — let’s be very clear on that,” he said. “This was a business that we inherited from a previous management. We have moved on.”

ITV initially had plans for programmes that would channel viewers on to Friends Reunited. Although hampered by laws forbidding product placement, ITV wanted to dash out a version of Blind Date that would matchmake old school friends. A reprise of another Cilla Black show, Surprise, Surprise, was also mooted, and a show in the vein of the BBC Who Do You Think You Are? — which propels viewers on to Genes Reunited in their hundreds of thousands.

ITV’s corporate chiefs faced opposition from their production arm, however, stymying attempts to build content around the brand. The collapse of the internet advertising market, and the inexorable rise of competitors such as Facebook, ultimately left it floundering.

There was further misery for Mr Grade in the company’s financial results: ITV posted a loss of £105 million in the six months to the end of June.

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