See our earlier post on possible acquisition talks between Yahoo and Bebo for $1 billion or so. The original report for the story comes from the UK’s Telegraph, based on a very weak source – “silicon valley gossip.” Still, we though it was worth a look at the most recent data to see if Bebo really could pull off a $1 billion or more sale.
We’ve pulled worldwide Comscore stats for MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. The most recent data (March) shows MySpace with 107 million unique monthly visitors. Facebook had 32 million and Bebo had 13.7 million. Bebo users tend to spend a lot of time on the site – on average they view just over 20 pages per day each, about equal to Facebook and a bit more than MySpace..
According to Comscore, Bebo today is about as big as Facebook was in May 06. Based on fairly aggresive growth estimates, Yahoo valued Facebook for as much as $1.6 billion at that time or a little later. If Bebo sold for $1 billion today, the buyer would be paying around $73/unique visitor, which is certainly in the range of acceptable.
Both Facebook and MySpace are growing faster than Bebo is today. But neither of those properties are available to Yahoo, so perhaps they are dipping down a little deeper into the social networking well.
Here’s the Comscore comparison chart for the three companies, based on worldwide data:
Social networking sites are so overhyped that it reminds me of the old .com bubble. Truly wonderful for the startups that have time to cash out, but it probably is going to burst soon enough. What do you think?
I expect we’ll see this acquisition go through – Yahoo needs this acquisition badly, much as Bebo needs someone with deep pockets to buy them (and there are not tha many companies that can afford or want to pay $1B for a social network). As you pointed out Yahoo has few choices, though I bet they could expand the user base if they added Yahoo eyeballs.
“about equal to Facebook and a bit more than Facebook”
I guess one of these should read Myspace?
isn’t Bebo growing much faster than either MySpace or Facebook in Europe, especially the UK?
I thought comScore was primarily focused on the US metrics market? How good is their coverage outside of the US, and in particular the UK where Bebo is its most popular? Alexa for example shows Bebo as being the 12th most popular site overall in the UK and that 35% of Bebo’s traffic comes from Britain compared to under 10% from the US.
May i ask a question, Mike ?
From where and how do you get these charts ?
Congoo.com and perfspot.com are two new sites whose traffic is going through the roof. Watch for these as potential aquisition targets too.
@ Hari: “Here’s the Comscore comparison chart for the three companies” – comScore.com
Duncan:
Either my comment got eaten or is waiting for approval or I messed something up. In any case, I recently learned that Alexa is/might be Asia-biased and underrepresenting the U.S. and especially Europe. See this:
http://blog.sim...lexa-Apart.html
My guess is this is related to privacy and the desire of Americans and esp. Europeans to keep it, while Asian population doesn’t have equally strong privacy concerns.
What happened to reading over your body copy Mike..
“about equal to Facebook and a bit more than Facebook.”
End of paragraph 2, you should fix that.
Why, why does Yahoo want to waste cash on these things? There’s so many better things that Yahoo could do with a billion dollars.
Yahoo could spend a 1 billion and improve their search!
Do you really think Social Networking sites are dying? It seems as though if anything, they are just growing more and more powerful. I noticed as sites and virtual worlds like MySpace and Second Life grow more popular, people are have developed their daily routine around them. Now I am not one to say Yahoo should spend $1 billion on Bebo, but I can see why they are considering it.
If you could design the ideal social networking site, what are some of the things you would include?
Uh, in a word and to answer your question – no.
no is calling out why this might be more valuable to Yahoo! then other potential suitors. Y! search share in the UK, and the EU in general, is really poor (the opposite of Asia – which they own). The UK has the highest search monetization in the world, so if a strong social networking property can be used to grow search share it’ll pay for itself. BT, Viacom, etc. don’t have the same upside.
Am I the only one wondering how it can be reasonable to pay $73 per unique user on such a fickle thing as a website? How can they expect to make back their money before the web crowd heads over to the next big thing?
Maybe I’m just missing the point of the whole thing, but it does seem like throwing a billion one dollar bills in the river to walk over it instead of building a proper bridge.
m_eiman: Yahoo threw over five billion one dollar bills in the river in 1999, so at the very least you would be able to say that they’re getting more efficient in building bridges to nowhere.
Drama 2.0: I guess that’s true. Now I’m just wondering: which river is it they’re throwing their money into, and how do I get a bit down-stream from them?
http://5.sex4xfree.info x