So, after a two-year foray into the world of social networking, AOL has decided to bid farewell to Bebo. You remember Bebo, right? All the kids are doing it. Well, they were. At the time of purchase (Bebo was a snip at $850m) it was widely considered to be the prime challenger to Facebook on the web 2.0 horizon. Its predominantly youthful demographic supposedly the perfect springboard for all sorts of lucrative brand activity.
Online though, it’s evolve or die – and the sad fact is that Bebo has lagged waaaaay behind.
The most recent numbers, from just a month or so back, show Bebo down to 13m uniques, compared to an all-conquering 420m+ for Facebook. The continued growth of the latter almost certainly including a fair amount of migration from the former. It’s starting to look a lot like AOL bought Bebo on the assumption that it would immediately deliver a significant revenue stream for them – but, fatally, without a clear understanding of quite how the goose would be helped to lay its golden egg.
Now AOL says that it would take “major investment” to compete with Facebook, and they’re not in a position to flash the cash. No kidding. Remember that AOL split with Time Warner last year, and during this period Facebook employed a staff of over 2,000 software engineers to develop their platform, while at times the Bebo roster has been as low as forty. Yes, forty. Four. Oh.
The message is fairly clear: too little, too late. Once again we can see a conventional media business (and incidentally how the times they are a-changin’ when we’re calling AOL “old media”), failing to understand the dynamics of, or invest effectively in, a social networking platform. (Friends Reunited? MySpace? Skye? Hat tip to Jemima over at the Guardian’s tech column for that particular triumvirate.)
Whether AOL shut Bebo or even manage to sell it, it will represent a significant loss for a parent company that can already ill afford it. Will the social marketing landscape be radically affected by its demise? Almost certainly not. Will voracious media dinosaurs trying desperately to monetise colossal online audiences learn any lessons from it? Only time will tell…
Content is king
See what the punters have been saying about Bebo here.
Sample:
- Bebo got hijacked by nasty little chavs who just wanted to post pictures of themselves with weapons and send abuse to other users. It’s a nasty little site and a lot of people won’t be sorry to see the back of it.
There’s more. Lots more. It’s enlightening.
