SO WHO is going to buy Friends Reunited, the website that made Britons log on to look up old mates and old flames? In six years the company has gone from an idea conceived by a couple in a suburban semi to the point where 12 million people have registered. It is quite some database, amounting to half of all homes with internet access.

Friends Reunited is the last serious British internet property to become available. It is a site and brand that people trust and are willing to interact with, and is expected to make about £6.5 million this year, up from £4.6 million in 2004.

The business has not been put up for auction yet, but the adviser Long Acre is actively looking for buyers and the expectation is that a deal will be done by the end of the year. Interested? If you are willing to stump up somewhere between £120 million and £150million, someone will call you back.

The list of would-be bidders is potentially very long. Obviously, there are the established web operators, such as Google, Yahoo! and eBay. Then there are the local newspaper groups, which have been scrambling to build an online presence. They are gradually becoming aware that they need to defend their ground as the big US competitors try to localise their products.

Or what about a broadcaster — could ITV or Channel 4 launch a Friends Reunited television series? Perhaps they could enhance the website with online video and generate a new stream of advertising. Friends Reunited would probably be a better concept than ITV’s increasingly dated “celebrity reality” theme.

Or maybe magazine publishers could line up as potential bidders. Emap, for example, is keen to develop online communities around its brands; Friends Reunited would bring extra skills to the task, as well as a handy complementary marketing channel.

A battle between bidders over Friends Reunited would demonstrate that the internet erases the boundaries between different media. It is a point that has been grasped by Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, who wants to put all the broadcaster’s content online and give customers the means to buy related products, too. As the BBC becomes both a retail mall and a broadcaster, it also becomes more like Google — the internet search engine that offers both news and price comparisons for shopping online, through its Froogle website.

This week, Johnston Press, the regional newspaper group, said that it wanted to get into online auctions. It says that people would prefer to buy and sell goods locally rather than on a larger scale such as eBay.

Will it work? The investment required is modest and, already, Johnston makes £3.2 million online from sales of £4.2 million. Presumably, the overheads have already been absorbed by the group’s online operation.

News Corporation, parent company of The Times, is also working on this theme. It has begun to assemble a string of internet properties under the umbrella of Fox Interactive Media. That effort saw the eyebrow-raising $580 million (£318 million) acquisition of MySpaces.com, a community website, in July. The website has something in common with Friends Reunited, in that it has become a popular community site for Americans to create blogs, web profiles and photo galleries and, so the theory goes, record their lives online.

The broader purpose is probably to find ways to reintegrate previously separate content online. It might be possible to create global news, sports and entertainment services by aggregating local content from around the world — bringing together both television and newspaper content in the process. That is effectively what the BBC is doing in the UK.

Of course, whoever tries to reintegrate media properties online has to do that without appearing to engage in excessive cross-selling. Historically, consumers have preferred to pick and choose the media they use. And many companies have struggled with cross- promotion, such as Time Warner via AOL. It is not easy to use a news outlet, for example, to promote one studio’s film output — that is, of course, if those businesses can actually be persuaded to talk to each other.

However, on the internet the power of Google suggests that there is a role for media super-brands. It is not clear who will build them — whether it be broadcasters, newspaper groups or magazine owners — but what is clear is that companies will increasingly compete against each other to try. As Thomas Hobbes, the English political philosopher, might have observed, it is war of all against all.

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