AOL set for loss on plans to sale Bebo

If Bebo is close down, will you miss it?online surveys Mike Harvey, San Francisco & ,}

AOL plans to sell or close down the online amicable network Bebo usually dual years after shopping it for $850 million.

Bebo has unsuccessful to benefit some-more users as it fought some-more renouned rivals such as Facebook.

AOL pronounced that Bebo indispensable "significant investment" to turn competitive, adding that it was not in a on all sides to yield such funding. Analysts pronounced that AOL would be expected to embrace a fragment of the total that it paid for the amicable network site in 2008.

"Bebo, unfortunately, is a commercial operation that has been disappearing and, as a result, would need poignant investment in sequence to contest in the competitive amicable networking space," Jon Brod of AOL Ventures told employees in an e-mail. "AOL is committed to operative fast to determine if there are any meddlesome parties for Bebo and the company"s current expectancy is to finish the vital analysis by the finish of May 2010."

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Michael and Xochi Birch, who founded Bebo in San Francisco in 2005, done about $600 million in the sale. They were reported to have about a 70 per cent stake at the time of the deal.

Although Bebo has been in the shade of rivals such as Facebook it has been strong internationally, together with in the UK. At the time of the sale in 2008 it had about 40 million users worldwide.

AOL longed for to daub that strength abroad to expostulate trade to AOL"s alternative free, ad-supported websites, generally internationally, whilst leveraging AOL"s instant-messaging communities to try to grow Bebo in the United States. Randy Falco, the afterwards arch senior manager of AOL, embellished a bullish design of the company"s plans to have Bebo the cornerstone of a "social media powerhouse" of assets.

Bebo"s assembly in the US, though, has been in decline. According to comScore it had 5.1 million US users in February, down from 5.8 million a year earlier, compared with the 210 million users of Facebook.

Mr Brod pronounced that AOL would see for intensity buyers and that it programmed to finish a vital analysis by the finish of May.

Clayton Moran, an researcher at The Benchmark Co, pronounced that the cost AOL paid for Bebo was questioned from the start.

"It done a lot of industry watchers blemish their heads," he said. "At this point they probably would confess they overpaid for it and right away they"re just cleaning it up."

AOL, a colonize in the dial-up internet commercial operation during the 1990s, has been trying to streamline and combine on rebuilding itself as a calm and advertising business. It runs dozens of websites, together with the renouned tech blog Engadget and the personal financial site WalletPop.