Bebo Finally Gets Acquired

I’m amazed — with so many tech bloggers and tech gossip sites around — that this one never leaked out. Today, AOL bought Bebo, the third-ranked social network site in the US, for $850 million in cash. The two companies supposedly had been talking for five months.

Bebo, to me, has always been the little social network that could: It doesn’t have the huge traffic of MySpace or Facebook — just 22.4 million unique visitors worldwide in January, according to comScore, half of them from the UK. Facebook and comScore each had five times as many visitors that month - 100.7 million for Facebook and 109.3 million for MySpace. And, its revenues are paltry (see Kara Swisher’s post at AllThingsD on this matter).

And yet, it has been quietly innovative in other areas. It was a pioneer of widget marketing, partnering with prominent widget firms six months before Facebook opened up its platform. Bebo also developed and fostered KateModern, a minor online video hit. But more importantly, it developed unique ways of integrating marketers into the video storyline and allowed Bebo members to interact with the characters and even the marketers themselves.

I’m not convinced that Bebo will big as big a deal for AOL as Randy Falco claimed it would be in the press release (“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” he said.) But it’s a social network with staying power and there are a lot of things that Bebo can teach AOL.