Talk about a good deal. Or a bad one, depending on which side of the coin you’d like to take.<\/p>\n

Somewhere between then and now, Bebo’s growth stalled as Facebook snapped up the #1 position in the UK and displaced the network. Bebo was in good company – in the US MySpace has shuffled the executive chairs numerous times to try to reclaim some of their former market glory. While Bebo still attracts a very healthy 12 million visitors a month, according to Google AdPlanner, there’s also a very noticeable downward trend from January of this year.<\/p>\n

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Source: Google Ad Planner<\/p><\/div>\n

Bebo may not be entirely at fault for that. After a half-hearted attempt to integrate Bebo with AIM (AOL’s Instant Message product), the company broke with TimeWarner, got a new CEO and decided that Bebo didn’t fit with the direction they were taking going forward.<\/p>\n

Existing Bebo users didn’t respond well to the changes, and while that may not have been the entire reason, it didn’t do anything to stave off competition from Facebook.<\/p>\n

For what’s speculated to be tax reasons – it’s cheaper for AOL to sell the company at a fire sale price than to put in the effort required to get the network back on a path of positive growth, AOL ends with a net loss of $840 million or more for the social experiment. {TechCrunch<\/a>} Neither company is confirming the final sale price, but reports range from $2.5 to less than 5 million {peHub<\/a>} with the highest estimate coming in around $10 million. {TechCrunch<\/a>}<\/p>\n

And you thought Gilt’s sale prices were good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talk about a good deal. Or a bad one, depending on which side of the coin you’d like to take.<\/p>\n