ITV IS preparing to slash the carrying value of website Friends Reunited in a year-end review of past acquisitions.

The review, to be carried out by ITV’s chief operating officer John Cresswell, is likely to conclude that Friends is worth less than when the company bought it after a hotly-contested auction in December 2005.

ITV paid £120m upfront for the website that brings together old school chums, but the price rose to £175m after Friends’ management team met the conditions for a maximum earnout three years later.

ITV bought Friends to build up its internet presence. The company was a pioneer of online social networking but has been overshadowed by the popularity of Facebook and Bebo, even though its sister sites that focus on genealogy and dating have been growing strongly.

ITV’s online revenue growth slowed in the first nine months of 2008 despite a jump in visitors to ITV.com. Income went up 6% to £25m, raising concerns that the company may not meet its revised target of £150m of online income by 2012. Some 8.2m people used ITV.com in October and 82m videos were watched on the site in the year to September.

Cresswell said the slowdown in growth was caused in part because Friends United stopped charging for access to its site in a bid to draw in more users and advertising income.

Any impairment will be dwarfed by the £1.6 billion of goodwill ITV wrote off at the half-year stage, linked to regional licences it bought as predecessor company Granada grew from being a regional player.

ITV is not the only media company that is having to write down the value of websites acquired in 2005 and 2006. Daily Mail and General Trust has cut the value of dating and shopping websites, while the American firm EW Scripps wrote off almost the entire £210m it paid for the price-comparison website Uswitch. ITV will announce its annual results on March 4.

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