Say you buy an asset of some form, which produces a regular payment to you (like a bond or a share, for example). The price you pay for it should reflect the stream of payments you are expecting to get from it. If there are fluctuations in the stream of payments, this is generally captured in the price as a discount to compensate you for the risk you are taking on.

If an asset produces payments in perpetuity, and say that you expect the payments to be equal each year, and that the riskiness of these payments doesn't change, then the price of the asset should remain roughly constant - that is, the price you buy it for would be the same as the price you sell it for some years later.

If, however, the asset has a fixed life, after which it no longer produces any payments to you, then over time, the price of the asset falls. I mention this because of this story. The same thing as above applies here. The asset is Friends Reunited, which has produced income for ITV since it was purchased in 2005. The gap between £175m and £25m is vast, but this ignores the profits that have been earned in the meantime. In fact, if ITV expected that revenues would likely tumble by 2009 - possible, given the fact that Facebook and MySpace were taking off at the time, and are much more all-encompassing sites - and the price they paid for it reflected this, then this isn't a story at all. Investments can be for short term rewards as much as they can be for long-term ones.

In all likelihood, ITV probably didn't anticipate how much the value of the business would fall, or at least that this was at the low end of their expectations. They may have hoped to be able to create a better competitor for other social network sites than what resulted. I also don't deny that some of this is related to the recession, and the effect that has had on most businesses' income. But at least some of this is part of the riskiness I mentioned above, and the original price likely reflected it. Investmests underperform as often as they overperform, and its pointless to pick out individual ones that were bad after the fact. It may not have been, strictly speaking, bad - the overall gain from the investment (profits plus resale price) may still have exceeded the initial purchase price.

All I'm saying is there is more going on than "ITV lose £150m on investment".