Comments on: AOL Purchases Bebo http://adviking.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/aol-purchases-bebo/ From the coal face of online advertising Thu, 22 May 2008 20:14:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=MU By: dylanfuller http://adviking.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/aol-purchases-bebo/#comment-24 dylanfuller Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:22:57 +0000 http://adviking.wordpress.com/?p=21#comment-24 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. 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.

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