Resurrected Bebo gets a facelift
Social networking site Bebo has only been in the news sporadically since AOL sold it to Criterion Capital Partners last June, but the company says it has been steadily rolling out new features. Today, it's unveiling a redesigned home page.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bebo's arc runs from boom asset to liability: by March 2008 BoomTown was already questioning the site's not-so-big traffic numbers, and in April 2010 AOL set a May deadline in its memo admitting Bebo would be sold or shut down. Two months later the Wall Street Journal reported AOL would unload the social site, which it did — to Criterion Capital Partners in June 2010.
Today's redesign is the first visible product move since that sale. It matters less as a relaunch than as a signal about what kind of owner Criterion intends to be: one investing in incremental feature rollouts rather than winding the asset down.
First-order effects
- Bebo's remaining users get a redesigned home page after months of quiet feature additions under Criterion Capital Partners, replacing the stale interface inherited from the AOL era.
- Criterion shifts the narrative around its acquisition from distressed castoff to operating company — the first public proof it is running Bebo rather than stripping it.
Second-order effects
- The contrast with AOL sharpens: while Bebo gets a facelift under new ownership, AOL is simultaneously shutting Going.com on May 1, closing Download Squad, and terminating freelancers across the Huffington Post Media Group — validating the decision to shed non-core properties even as buyers keep them alive on far smaller budgets.
- Rival second-tier social networks facing the same scale problem now have a template: sell cheap to a small private buyer who can operate lean where a portal parent could not justify the cost.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a two-tier social market: a handful of scaled networks competing for engagement, while also-rans survive as low-cost niche properties run by small owners — with portal-era acquisitions increasingly written off rather than integrated.
- If Criterion's maintenance-mode model works, expect more distressed social assets to change hands quietly at fire-sale prices instead of being shuttered outright, changing how acquirers value user bases they cannot grow.
The trend: Portal-era social network acquisitions are unwinding, with failed properties moving from big media parents to small private operators running lean redesigns instead of shutdowns.