So I wake up this morning and Twitter is all a-twitter with the news that AOL has purchased social media site Bebo for the nice sum of $850 million.  Wish I had that kind of money lying around…

AOL, the online arm of mighty Time Warner, has paid a little more than $20 per user (Bebo has roughly 40 million) for the right to throw some more advertising in their faces.  Randy Falco, AOL CEO says,

What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.

OK, cool.  I understand the raw power of having access to over 40 million people that spend around 40 minutes of their day at Bebo.  That’s really a staggering number and shows the sticking power of a good social networking site.  Just how many hours a day do you spend watching videos on YouTube or playing some silly quiz on Facebook? I will only admit to 15 minutes, although it’s much more than that.

So how will this affect Bebo?  I’m not sure as I can’t make a judgement call on a site that I’ve never really spent much time at.  But folks in Europe will soon be able to tell us how AOL is screwing up this company like they have so many others.  Bebo is very popular on the other side of the pond and I’m fairly sure that if the suckage level gets too high, we’ll hear the shouts here on the Western hemisphere.

Photo credit:  Business Wire