AOL Purchases Bebo
March 17, 2008
On the back of the SXSW Mark Zuckerberg interview and the interesting macro movements around the future of social media advertising, it seems that Time Warner provides further validation to these trends and have acquired, considered by many the #3 player, Bebo for AOL.
AdViking’s early take is that by adding the additional platform and traffic to what they have all ready, AOL has some very interesting pieces in play and with their Platform A advertising stable they have a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of what happens next. Especially, if we consider that Zuckerberg considers that the solution to social media advertising isn’t going to be found in the next couple of years but decades.
The coverage has ranged from:
- What did they actually buy crunching of the financials at Boomtown?
- BuzzMachine is downright pessimistic at the thought of AOL crushing another WWW innovator
- Financial Times: A very good deal based on benchmarking against the prices for MySpace and Facebook
Entry Filed under: Bebo, Facebook, M&A, MySpace, deals, social media. Tags: aol, Facebook, M&A, MySpace, Platform A, social media.
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dylanfuller | March 19, 2008 at 11:22 am
Here’s my 2 cents worth on this deal… I have to agree with RWW that this deal is not creating value. AOL + Bebo = a bad defence… Here’s the post on RWW:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aol_acquires_bebo.php
AOL has a great market opportunity right now that Yahoo is busy trying to stay independent, but they need to capitalize NOW and be more savvy! Spending $850M on Bebo may be the high water market on Web2.0 M&A… I thought the MSFT investment in Facebook was the high water mark but maybe this sets a new benchmark. For $850M they could have bought a lot of other smaller and more interesting businesses.
Giving some credit to AOL - the fact that you can use AIM (since Dec ‘07, I am a little slow here) via Gmail is interesting and worth watching. If I were helping drive strategy at AOL I would leverage the Google relationship more and use existing AOL assets to build out other social networking and search services.