Bebo: What Does 850 Million Get You?

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Manoj Jasra - Friday, March 14, 2008 0 Comments

In the last couple of days one of the biggest stories has been the purchase of Social Network Giant, Bebo by AOL. With approximately 5% search market share and being one of the most visited sites on the planet, can Bebo really help make a difference to a search property which is been fairly average for the last few years? Here's some coverage of the Bebo purchase around the Internet:

So what does 850 million dollars get you these days, below are some Bebo stats from Hitwise to help quantify AOL's purchase:

Bebo ranked 4th among a custom category of 55 social networks, after MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook for Feb-08 receiving 1.15% of all U.S. visits to the category.
MySpace's share of U.S. Internet visits was 67 times larger compared with Bebo and Facebook's share of US Internet visits (among all categories) was 11x that of Bebo in Feb-08.
Bebo's share of U.S. Internet visits is down year on year. Share of U.S. Internet visits (among All Categories) to Bebo were down 23% last week and down 22% in Feb-08.
The average time spent on Bebo in Feb-08, was 30 minutes and 26 seconds, more than both MySpace (30m7s) and Facebook (21m0s). The average time spent on the site is flat year-over-year, MySpace is slightly down and Facebook is up 69%.
22.15% of U.S visits to Bebo last week came from MySpace last week.
Of 'www.bebo.com's total upstream traffic in Feb-08, 17.37% consisted of new visitors and 82.63% consisted of returning visitors.
In the UK, Bebo is the most searched-for brand (ahead of eBay and Facebook) and has enormous brand equity.

Labels: AOL, Social Networking