AOL has purchased the Bebo social network for $850 million. They made the announcement today in a press release. They claim Bebo has 40 million members worldwide. With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX. The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone. Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will acquire Bebo for $850 million in cash. “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. “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.” “AOL understands the shifting dynamics of the Web and has clearly demonstrated its commitment to leveraging the ever-increasing power of social networks,” said Bebo President, Joanna Shields. “With one and the same vision in this area, it was a natural progression for Bebo to join AOL, and we look forward to working together to continue to expand the online social experience globally.” Like other social networks Bebo offers a combination of profiles and photo and video sharing. They also have thousands of applications. Past rumors have valuated Bebo at around $1 billion to $1.5 billion. They came pretty close to that with this $850 million sale. Larry Dignan at Between the Lines sees this as the start of a social networking consolidation round. As for the rest of the field, AOL’s purchase of Bebo is likely to set off a round of consolidation among smaller players that would be fine tuck-in deals in a larger setting. With Bebo off the table sites like Ning and LinkedIn have just become more valuable-especially to a company like Yahoo, which appears to be left out of the social networking party. There are others still out there that the big Internet players could snag like Friendster.com, hi5 and myyearbook.com. MyYearBook.com recently claimed to be the fourth largest U.S. social network – ahead of Bebo. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Keifer Bonvillain Writing Oprah Winfrey Tell-All: ‘Ruthless’ – Tittle …
The Post Chronicle – Keifer Bonvillain, 37, is the fella who tried to extort 1.5 million from Oprah Winfrey. Keifer Bonvillain has launched a new Web site in his effort to write …

Should Tech Bloggers Form a Dream Team to Destroy CNET?
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has an interesting post that says more blogs are raising capital. Arrington writes that because of this capital it may be changing the politics of linking in the blogosphere. And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don’t link at the right time and in two weeks when you’re pushing your own headline, you’ll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously. Michael Arrington’s talk of the “Gang” brings back memories of the old A-list linking discussions. Does Venture Capital make a blog think more about where it links? Possibly. VC money can mean there are people looking over your shoulder wanting you to reach those traffic goals you promised them to get their investment. VC money can run out and not be replinished. These blogs might link more often to higher trafficked blogs where a return link might pack a bigger whallop. They may also want to avoid linking to their competition. Arrington also says he would like to create the Dream Team (think 92 Olympic games) of tech bloggers to take out CNET. What I’d like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Mens Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey. Just the thought of being a part of something like that has held us back from raising any outside capital at all. I believe we have the beginning of a team that can play a role in this new Dream Team. So think twice before taking that venture money, guys. You may be shutting more doors of opportunity than you realize. Is CNET really an ambitious enough goal for a tech blogging Dream Team? Slicon Alley Insider is happy to help TechCrunch kill CNET although they “would secretly hope that we could find more interesting things to do.” Chartreuse writes, “The idea of blogger super heroes getting together to fight CNET just struck me as bizarre.” If you had a Dream Team sized squad of technology bloggers who would be on it? Hardly anyone would agree with the answer to that question. Everyone has different ideas of who their favorite tech bloggers are. The same linking politics Michael Arrington describes in his post would have many other tech bloggers immediately aligning against this Dream Team. The blogosphere allows for leading blogs but it frowns on the idea of a single blog (in this case the Dream Team blog) getting the bulk of all the web traffic. There is already a Dream Team of sorts for technology blogs anyway and that is TechMeme, a website that makes it easy to quickly find what some of the top tech bloggers have to say. Meanwhile, CNET appears to have survived the blogosphere assualt. CNET partially assimilated itself into the blogosphere several years ago by launching blogs of their own. Kara Swisher at BoomTown reports that TechCrunch is considering “raising as much as $15 million, giving it a $35 million valuation.” TechCrunch will probably need the money to compete with all the other technology blogs raising money. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

CBS Launches Local Ad Network
Caroline McCarthy at News.com’s The Social blog reports that the CBS Television Network is launching a program that will have local bloggers installing CBS News widgets in exchange for revenues. The CBS Local Ad Network is being managed by a company called Syndigo. One blog already approved for the CBS widget advertising plan is SFBayStyle – you can see the widget on the right side of the blog. On Monday, the program was launched in a selection of the TV network’s regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. Within the next few weeks, CBS has said, the CBS Local Ad Network will come to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Some of the blogs currently participating in the new program are San Francisco’s SFBayStyle and Boston’s Red Sox Nation. Approved sites will be able to choose the content of the CBS headlines displayed (breaking news, sports, politics), as well as select from a number of options to determine, for example, whether they want video content in the widget. Bloggers can’t just embed a widget and hope for profits, CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group president Jonathan Leess told CNET News.com. “There’s a screening process, obviously,” he said. “We have to figure out or get some visibility into what the content is on that site, and then we screen, but we have a third party (Syndigo Networks) that administers all this for us.” CBS declined to share exact breakdowns of the revenue-distribution process. “All of it’s based on certain traffic estimates from each of the sites, and (ad) placement,” Leess said. Paid Content says no payments will be made until over $50 are earned by the partner. Payment is 45 days after the calendar month; payments that don’t exceed $50 will roll over until they do. The contract runs one year. As far as I can tell-and I may be missing something in the fine print-members have to sign up before they are told the rev share amount. Turning local bloggers into affiliates is a smart move. This is the kind of idea that could also motivate others to launch local blogs and generate a local blog boom. It may not necessarily be this exact program from CBS that ignites a local blog boom but the news networks do have some potential here to use blogs to spread their brand. The program that succeeds will be the one that bloggers can build a business around. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

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