The Gong Show

So, Bebo sold to AOL for $850m today. A few quick reactions:

# I think Bebo’s audience was becoming less and less engaged in the site in recent months. My favorite metric to check as a measure of engagement is “time spent per visitor.” Using this metric, you can compare sites of very different sizes to see how engaged the average user is. Also, time spent per visitor is a great metric because it doesn’t penalize sites well-designed sites that manage to minimize pageviews. Check out Bebo’s decline:

As you can see from this chart, Bebo’s time spent per visitor has been slipping steadily since September. Looks like they’re selling just in time given that trendline.

# This Bebo price makes the $580m MySpace purchase look even more insulting. Rupert took candy from babies.

# Given the current $15bn value on Facebook, this exit is Bebo waiving a white flag. Unbelievable that $850m could be interpreted that way, I know.

# Bebo is exiting just a couple of months after launching their platform app network strategy… it must not have worked well.

# AOL is irrelevant, perhaps more so today. Nothing about AOL absorbing Bebo will improve either company.

Side Note: All of these thoughts, except the first one, should probably be Twitter posts. I find myself expressing ideas in under 140 characters quite often now. I didn’t Twitter these because I didn’t want to Twitter a bunch about a single subject.