ITV’S Friends Reunited reported a 37 per cent increase in revenue to £12 million in the first nine months of the year, a figure that will be used to try to scotch perceptions that the website has wilted under the broadcaster’s ownership.

The previously undisclosed figure emerged as NTL, the cable company, fights to put together a financing package to help it to fund a £5 billion cash bid for Britain’s leading commercial broadcaster. Its shares were off 5.8 per cent to $25 yesterday lunchtime, as investors worried about the costs of a cash deal.

Meanwhile it emerged that ITV is weighing up a plan to close its final salary pension scheme to existing members.

A move to axe the scheme, which has already been closed to new members, would crystalise the deficit of £325 million but would not reduce it.

Though the pension deficit will be a negotiating point in any takeover of ITV it is understood that the move, which ITV is consulting on, is unrelated to NTL’s interest.

NTL has cited a failure to develop Friends Reunited as a key justification for its approach. It wants to expand Friends, probably using the Virgin brand, for which it owns licensing rights.

Friends has lost share when compared with the social networking sites MySpace and Bebo, according to Hitwise data. In the “communities and chat” category, its share has tumbled from 3.25 per cent in December to 1.82 per cent last month.

However, a spokesman for Friends said that the school reunion website “is often incorrectly grouped for performance analysis” with MySpace, owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times.

The website says that monthly unique users increased by 16 per cent to five million in the first nine months of the year on average, and that the total number of subscribers went up from 900,000 to 1.4 million. In ITV’s previously disclosed half-year figures, Friends Reunited revenue was up by 50 per cent to £8 million and its profit margin was more than 50 per cent. The extra £4 million in the third quarter suggests that growth has slowed.

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