Thursday, March 13, 2008

AOL Buys Bebo Just to Resell It?

News this morning that AOL is buying social network Bebo for $850 million. This comes one day after the news that Time Warner has finally gone on record that they want to dump AOL. What the hell is going on? Are they acting as middleman here? Buy Bebo for $850 mil, do some simple/basic integration with AIM and then claim it is now worth $1.5 billion in a couple of month? Perhaps Yahoo is interested in Bebo too, and the quickest way for them to get there is to have AOL as their broker? Got me... it all seems a bit odd to me.

Oh yeah, this all comes a couple of days after AOL's "Platform A" division (supposedly the company's saving grace) canned their head honcho... and then today mentioned they are going to cut half their Ad Sales force.

I hope there is some master plan behind all of this, but I have to be honest... I don't hold out hope. At this point I'm going to sit on my TWX stock until AOL is dealt away... I expect a pretty good bounce in price as soon as that happens. Considering the stock price is getting sucked down the toilet lately, that can't happen soon enough in my opinion.

Oh yeah, I consider this the death knell for Bebo. They are going to have to now go through what will likely be not one, but two, excruciating integrations. One with AOL (who have a bad record at this) and another with whoever (if anyone) buys AOL. Facebook and MySpace send your thank you cards to Dulles c/o of Ron Grant & Randy Falco.

5 comments:

Testing blogger JE said...

Amen! Well put J!

Unknown said...

Do you really think Bebo cares whether this is a death knell or not? They're $850,000,000 richer then they were yesterday. I'd kill off one of my own companies for a lot less than that.

Anyone want to buy a t-shirt company? ;)

Anonymous said...

good article. there is a new super site on the horizon that offers free music downloads
this in itself is a powerful attention getter

Jaxon Oakley said...

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