Yahoo’s Rumored $1 billion Talks With Bebo
Michael Arrington
32 comments »
Update: Recent Comscore traffic data for Bebo, MySpace and Facebook is here.
Rumors about social networking site Bebo being for sale come up every few months. First it was British Telecom for $550 million in July 2006 (we started that one), then the Financial Times reported they were in talks with Viacom a month later.
Now, The UK’s Telegraph is reporting that Yahoo is looking, and may pay as much as $1 billion. Just one problem, though. The Telegraph isn’t exactly known for breaking tech M&A stories, and the rumor has an exceptionally weak source - “according to silicon valley gossip” the article says. That sounds like something the Telegraph’s correspondent overheard after ten or twelve cocktails last night at a party. And while I don’t doubt that Yahoo is sniffing around Bebo, $1 billion seems a tad high for the service.
Yahoo would have bid as high as $1.6 billion for Facebook last year according to leaked documents. But Bebo, while large and growing, is far smaller than Facebook. And it’s also smaller than Hi5, Orkut, Friendster and Tagged, according to Comscore.
On the plus side, Bebo does claim 25 million users, about a quarter of what MySpace has today. And they are very strong in the UK. Sometime last year I stopped becoming incredulous as the size of some of these acquisitions - If it takes $65 million to buy a Grouper, then maybe Bebo really is worth $1 billion.
I have emails in to Bebo and Yahoo for comment.
Yeah it’s getting a lot tougher to tell where these prices will end up. Maybe the Facebook billion dollar holdout will come around to being genius, then go on to being not ambitious enough.
Still the one that surprises me most is the $550mln mark bounced around for that virtual world Sony’s looking at with like half a million users. Even for maybe not coming to fruition– wow.
The social networking sites are really a magnet for the right audience. They may be juts testing the ground. but look at this Russian “Facebook” http://alexa.com/data/details/.....ontakte.ru
that has grown to 0.5m users and 10th most visisted site in Russian Internet in four months since launch. It’s really amazing.
I really hope we’re not in a bubble. These offers - even on speculation - are huge.
I can see them selling for that, why not?! Apart from local and business networking sites Bebo, Tagged.com and MSN Spaces seem to be the only major ones which are still growing significantly according to the proxy usage stats we have.
The figures are huge indeed, for sites which attract mainly students and other “fly by” visitors who are multi-homed on various social networks. Time to sell before the bubble bursts, I guess.
This is fun
Yahoo buys Bebo and Microsoft buys Yahoo. Lol
Is this another mktg opportunity missed by Truemors?
Mr. Arrington,
I’ve been a regular reader of TechCrunch from the time I discovered that a site as this exists in today’s gasping online world.
The most interesting part being the astonishing number of Feed subscribers. But something weird is happening in past 48 hrs or so.
The last time I checked out, TechCrunch had some 400K+ subscribers. And now it has reduced to 390K. Its major drop, how come? 10,000+ subscribers unlist themselves in hardy 2 days time?
Keep in mind the Site is absolutely massive in the UK, and given the exchange rate 1 billion may be cheap.
Allan - The numbers go down every weekend, and come back tuesday morning.
Markus, It’s massive exclusively with school children in the UK, which is the wrong place to be for all sorts of reasons.
Debbie
Comscore data is skewed it only takes into account U.S traffic, if I’m right. So they are probably bigger than anybody assumes or knows.
“I have emails in to Bebo and Yahoo for comment.”
Heh.
Does that *ever* work?
I had a drink with Michael Birch and Xochi a few moths ago at Internet dinners which are hosted by Robert Loch here in London. I spoke with Michael and Xochi about selling Bebo and asked what price would be enough to sell? $1bn - $3bn
I have read the Telegraph article and have to say there is nothing new in the article and in my humble opinion pure speculation that arises every 6 months about Bebo.
If Bebo do not sell there is always Piczo who are very keen to sell or Netlog which is one of Europe’s biggest social networks with 18m users. http://www.vecosys.com/2007/05.....in-europe/
Finally does Yahoo need to buy into the social network space. Yes, but they also need to buy into online Office application market i.e Zimbra and they also need to make Panama work, so do they need to find their own DoubleClick or aQuinta?
If I was Yahoo I am not sure Bebo would be top of my acquisition list right now but never say never.
Yahoo already has a social networking site 360, do they really need another Bebo. Will they combine together?
I stumbled upon a PR/Marketing camp @ a pub after work a few weeks back. The Yahoo! marketing head for Canada was there, back from a strategy meeting @ Yahoo! head office. He spoke non-stop about ’social networking’ being flawed, and that Yahoo!’s Groups and ‘360′ were the answer. According to their strategy people want to surround topics not other people and by searching out topics on ‘Groups’ users can find those specific topics and discuss. Funny enough he spent 3/4 of his time talking about Facebook, MySpace and Google.
I’m not sure the presentation of the Yahoo! marketing head [Canuck ops] is enough to add doubt to the story but it gives you an idea what the foot soldiers are being fed from the top.
Are we heading towards internet crash 2.0 with all these massive buyouts? BTW what ever happened on the Flektor deal did it go through?
It will probably happen, just like with faceboook..
Bebo is cool. Yahoo! isn’t (although they try really really hard and it shows).
Bebo’s coolness gets killed if they’re Yahoo’ed…
Bebo is excellent, a lot more structured than MySpace and less advertising muck. But 1billion? For that price, Yahoo are very welcome to buy my sites http://www.buyingcheap.co.uk and http://www.buyingcheap.com.au
Wow! 1 Bil for that site is crazy. If a business is going to spend that kind of money they should remember what their Momma always said, “you better shop around!”
I expect the acquisition frenzy to continue beyond Bebo. Check out the Alexa trends for all these independent social networks:
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....l=bebo.com
I lyk bebo its awsum myn iz silversilv.bebo.com cum ta ma page plz plz plz plz plz !!!!! or fuk of !!!
That’s nice, and a huge price i think though.
Wow who would think in the 1990’s that sites likes bebo and mysapce can be worth 1 billion
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