Rumour Bell - Yahoo seeking to buy Bebo for $1 Billion
There has been another rumour today after the Google buying feedburner rumour that Yahoo is looking to buy the social networking site Bebo for $1 billion. Bebo which is the most popular social networking site in UK was founded by Michael Birch along with his wife Xochi, in 2005. The site has about 25 million users which is just the quarter of the total Myspace users.
Bebo has been recently bombarded with a lot of offers from a number of companies such as Viacom. But Bebo's founder Birch rejected that offer saying that they would like to be independent rather than selling Bebo to others. But Yahoo's recent deal of $1 billion seems big enough for Birch to nod his head for the deal. Earlier Yahoo offered $1.6 billion to Facebook, another social networking site but they rejected their offers. Although Bebo doesn't has a very large network as compared to Facebook but still has enough for Yahoo to grab some share in the social networking sites which they haven't so far succeeded although Flickr has been a great success. The reason Flickr not providing them much success in this field because of its inability to integrate other tools such as chat, sharing videos etc. into one single platform. In a way this deal looks too much for a site with just 25 million users as compared to Google $1.76 billion purchase of Youtube but Yahoo thinks that they can make the Bebo far better and popular than it has been now.
Social networking sites are growing at a fast pace with about 60% of internet users signing up for social networking sites and the interest of the big bosses of Internet have really proved this.
