Remember the Bebo acquisition talks that swept through a few months ago? Well, here’s round two. UK news giant Telegraph reports that Yahoo! may be in talks with Bebo for a possible $1 billion acquisition.
Bebo is a social network which (while being San Francisco-based) failed to gain traction in the U.S. but has heavily managed to capture the European/Australian/New Zealand market. Currently with over 25 million users, roughly 1/6th of the size of MySpace, the service has popularly grown in recent months — offering features which compete with everything from Twitter to YouTube.
While the $1 billion evaluation does seem high, it is notable that MySpace had less than 16 million users at the time of its acquisition, and the industry being much smaller than it is now that seemed absurd to people. Yahoo!, like with the products they’ve acquired in the past, has had an attempt at this market with their Yahoo! 360 product which never seemed to gain any traction at all.
Opinion
To recall, Bebo turned down a $550m offer from British Telecom Group back in June last year stating they were ‘asking for the billion.’ Another recall, Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for a billion a couple months back (and said they’d go as high as $1.6b), which Facebook happily turned down as well. Put the two together, and I think there’s a really strong chance this is going to happen. Bebo has been looking for a buyer for a while now (and $1 billion!), and Yahoo!’s been looking for a social network as well (with $1 billion in their pockets!). Put the two together, and we have a deal.
Stay tuned! We’ll keep you posted on this one.
