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March 14, 2008
Bebo Does It! Bought By AOL For £423M ($850M)
Bebo has found a buyer in AOL willing to lay-out $850M in cash. London and San Francisco-based Bebo likes to call itself the #3 social networking site in the English-speaking world (behind MySpace and Facebook), and #1 in the UK, Ireland, Australia & New Zealand. It claims 40M+ members and boasts the stat that it ads 5 new members every second.
WallStrip does its Up With Bebo profile
For AOL, this would seem to be a no-brainer. They have some nice momentum on the advertising side with the collection of Platform A businesses and now they have a hot social network that might make people forget about the AOL dial-up walled garden and have to refresh their image of AOL.
Founded after MySpace and Facebook, Bebo could have became a distant laggard. To get it to $850M, Bebo can thank its focus on original content. It co-produced "KateModern," a super popular Web TV show, now in its second season. The show contributed to the high minutes per session that Bebo enjoys (33 minutes per day on average).
Bebo had raised $15M in Series A funding in 2007 from Balderton Capital (then Benchmark Capital Europe). The big winners here are husband/wife founders Michael and Xochi Birch. Another co-founder is Jim Scheinman who is now an Entrepreneur in Residence at Charles River Ventures. It's good to see a guy like Jim get a payout here as he has been working this space, having been head of BD at Friendster.
BTW - The Independent of London reports that founder Michael Birch's dream is to someday have sufficient resources to build a tunnel under the Atlantic (he's a big fan of the English Tunnel.)
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Posted on March 14, 2008 05:33 AM | Posted to Media | Permalink
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