Yahoo Bebo Acquisition Rumor

Posted on May 21, 2007

We can't get one rumor resolved before another one starts. There is a rumor going around that Yahoo is going to buy Bebo, a social network with 25 million users. The rumor was started by this article in the London Telegraph. As Mashable writes the rumored purchase price is $1 billion.

A huge rumor is floating around the UK this weekend, topped off with articles in the British Sunday papers: Yahoo is said to be in talks with Bebo about a $1 billion acquisition.
The site, launched in 2005, has been the source of many acquisition rumors - most notably with Viacom - but this one has the strongest signal, having been picked up by the mainstream press. Incidentally, Viacom has also shown interest in buying Last.fm, another success in the UK (see Viacom-Last.fm).
If it goes ahead, the acquisition would be almost twice the size of News Corp's $580m MySpace buy, but cheap compared to Facebook, for which Yahoo was prepared to pay $1.6 billion at one point (Facebook is now worth much more). Bebo has around 25 million users, and founder Michael Birch has previously said that he'd like to keep the site independent - a Bebo IPO may even be possible.

Bebo also recently launched a clone of the popular Twitter microblogging service so Yahoo would acquire a Twitter clone as well if the rumored deal actually happens. Last year there were discussions between Yahoo and Facebook but no deal materialized as Facebook decided not to sell.