by Mathieas McNaughton
"AOL purchased Bebo to be the cornerstone of its social networking strategy at a time when Bebo was transitioning itself into a destination for original content."
http://news.tubefilter.tv/2010/07/15/the-rise-and-fall-of-bebo-the-video-network-that-could-have-been-part-2
Posted by
modelmotion
at
5:38 PM
Labels: Bebo, KateModern, Mathieas McNaughton, Web Series
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AOL had its own video department for a long time previous to the purchase of Bebo. They even had an in house studio producing a music video show with original performances from major stars. For the most part the content on their video site was old TW content but they also ventured into a UGC area called Uncut. At the time of the Bebo purchase AOL had already began to outsource jobs within their video department. Following the purchase of Bebo, AOL quickly moved to get out of the video production business and shortly after that they shut down much of their own in house video department. AOL still has http://video.aol.com
ReplyDeleteIt seems most likely that AOL purchased Bebo to market the stable of in house "properties" it had established as the corner stone of its current business strategy. Bebo probably had around 30+m members at the time of AOLs purchase. At the time of the final sale it had 40m. The problem was that AOL members needed a 2nd sign in to get to their AOL profiles which is pretty lame. Also AOL really had no mechanism for porting over AIM users or ICQ users (ok, does anyone still use ICQ?) so there was no easy way to integrate their large user base with the existing Bebo user base.
The Bebo numbers pale in comparison to Facebook, so clearly AOL needed to follow the numbers if it wanted to fully capitalize on its "properties".
The ENTIRE Time Warner/AOL/Turner merger was one of the biggest clusterf##ks the business world has ever seen. Everything about it screamed, "let's tie up as many competitors as we possibly can so we can run a virtual monopoly like the one Bill Gates has". As a result EVERYONE ended up being an employee of the entity in the merger that had the most shareholders when matters were subject to a vote.
ReplyDeleteIn an environment like this it is almost shocking that nobody saw the Bebo disaster coming. Once they squeezed Kate Modern for all it was worth they stunted the growth of the company to benefit their own video entity. At least that's how it looked from the outside anyway.
Once they announced that they wouldn't fund new shows, that was the final gun, the game was over. You can't live off of one successful series forever on the web and Bebo/AOL/Warner/Turner found this out the hard way and guess what? Bebo is all but dead.
NEVER go into business with publically traded companies when your business is entertainment. EVER!
Well ultimately what is killing Bebo is Facebook. It is even killing MySpace. What is surprising is that Bebo offers a level of customization that Facebook has never offered and one would expect that would be valued. On the other hand MySpace offers even more ability to customize and while that was once the "hot" thing Facebook seems to be preferred. This switch to Facebook came after a lot of MySpace users had switched their profiles to private. Then came the preference for a switch from "screen name" to "real identity" and that has always been Facebooks real strength.
ReplyDeleteNow Google is faced with a major challenge. They held off on developing Orkut because they had major sales agreements with both MySpace and Facebook. However now that Facebook membership has gone through the roof and Facebook has a lot of content behind its walled garden, Google has to deal with a new competitor in the Ad market.
Social networks are all about numbers and it is unlikely that video played a significant role in Bebo's rise and fall. It was always more popular in the UK..... thats why it was a good match for KateModern but it was a social network first with video layered on top. Not a bad thing to try out but remember they already had 30 million members at the time. The one thing Bebo did get out of KateModern was some really good exposure in the press, both in the UK and World wide.
The core of a social network is how well it fills its core function: keeping you up to date with what your circle of friends are up to and that is something Facebook does very well.
I decided to double check my 30m number..
ReplyDelete" Bebo, which is backed by Benchmark Capital, has seen an enormous growth
in user numbers since it launched in July 2005. It now has over 30 million
registered members and is the third most popular social network in the US*.
The 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist named Bebo as the number one search
term, ahead of "MySpace" and the "World Cup.""
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bebo-appoints-google-executive-to-lead-international-social-networking-expansion-53493817.html
... which is when Joanna Shields joined Bebo.