14 DAY TRIAL // AOL is a mere shell of its former self, but it’s still sitting on some pretty valuable assets. That said, it’s sitting on some rather useless assets as well and one of them has been Bebo, a social network popular in the UK it acquired a couple of years ago. ‘Has been,’ because AOL has apparently been able to sell the struggling social network to an unknown buyer for an unknown price.
Mashable, not regularly known for breaking this type of stories, says sources close to the deal claim that AOL has found a buyer for Bebo. The stage of the deal wasn’t specified, but it sounds like it has been completed and Bebo is out of AOL’s hands. There’s not that much to go on for now, but if this proves solid, more details should be coming in soon.
There is every reason to believe that the social network was sold though, AOL made its intentions clear a few months ago. The former giant company decided that it didn’t make sense to keep the social network earlier this year. Bebo wasn’t a good fit for any of AOL’s existing products from the get-go and Facebook’s increasing dominance worldwide made Bebo even less interesting.
Realizing that it wasn’t going to do anything with the property, AOL reportedly started looking for buyers a couple of months ago. If no would-be buyers were to be found, AOL was prepared to shut down Bebo entirely.
AOL has been slimming down for the past year and especially in recent months. Similar to Yahoo, it has been shedding non-essential products in order to focus on its strong core properties with a great emphasis on content. Very recently, it sold the ICQ instant messaging service to the Russian investment company DST for a reported $187.5 million. It remains to be seen how much AOL was able to get for Bebo, though it is very likely well below the purchase price of $850 million.