AOL aquires Bebo
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
AOL formally announced the aquistion of Bebo today. The aqusition of Bebo, for a cool 850 million US dollars represents an interesting shift for AOL. The deal for UK based Bebo is an interesting one. AOL has been associated with an ageing audience whilst Bebo has been a very young audience. The two companies had been working together through the AIM and ICQ (instant messaging) tools and this deal was cited as an opportunity to reverse the AIM audience into a proper social network. The other obvious benefit at this stage is the age ranges of their audience, Bebo = young, AOL = older. So putting these two together AOL have a core base at both ends of the scale, potentially broadening the range of services they can offer.
Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK has delivered some great analysis over here.
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