Update: Recent Comscore traffic data for Bebo, MySpace and Facebook is here . Rumors about social networking site Bebo being for sale come up every few months. First it was British Telecom for $550 million in July 2006 (we started that one), then the Financial Times reported they were in talks with Viacom a month later.
Now, The UK’s Telegraph is reporting that Yahoo is looking, and may pay as much as $1 billion. Just one problem, though. The Telegraph isn’t exactly known for breaking tech M&A stories, and the rumor has an exceptionally weak source – “according to silicon valley gossip” the article says. That sounds like something the Telegraph’s correspondent overheard after ten or twelve cocktails last night at a party. And while I don’t doubt that Yahoo is sniffing around Bebo, $1 billion seems a tad high for the service. Yahoo would have bid as high as $1.6 billion for Facebook last year according to leaked documents. But Bebo, while large and growing, is far smaller than Facebook. And it’s also smaller than Hi5, Orkut, Friendster and Tagged , according to Comscore. On the plus side, Bebo does claim 25 million users, about a quarter of what MySpace has today. And they are very strong in the UK. Sometime last year I stopped becoming incredulous as the size of some of these acquisitions – If it takes $65 million to buy a Grouper , then maybe Bebo really is worth $1 billion. I have emails in to Bebo and Yahoo for comment.
