Bebo

Bebo is a social utility that especially in England had a strong position in 2007, but then fell significantly behind Facebook.

The company was founded by Mr and Mrs Birch in San Francisco in 2005, some had 25 million members and competed with Myspace that since the summer of 2005, the News Corp. empire belonged (until 2011 ).

Bebo was popular in Europe and Oceania: 62.5 percent of the Bebo community recruited from Europeans. However, Bebo is in many parts of Europe, for example in Germany, largely unknown, as it was long an English- page.

In the UK, Bebo had expected after each visit, the then world leader Myspace even overtaken in July 2007: 10.7 million Britons looked over at Bebo, while there were 10.1 million at Myspace. The third-place finisher, Facebook, collected 7.6 million visits.

On 13 March 2008, the Time Warner Group took over their internet offer AOL Bebo for $ 850 million. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes rated this as the " riskiest takeover" of his company in the year.

On June 17, 2010 Bebo was sold due to failure of AOL to the California equity firm Criterion Capital Partners for an undisclosed price. It should have been less than ten million dollars. 2013 then bought the Bebo founder Michael Birch his website for a million dollars back.

In September 2012, it was announced that an investor company took over the Berlin VZ networks of Holtzbrinck Digital to Bebo. Regardless of the company's restructuring Bebo thus increased temporarily to one of the largest platforms in Germany, mainly due to the end of April 2013, shutdown SchülerVZ.