The end of Bebo

AOL + Bebo: From idiots, for idiots
Anglochat dimwits couldn't stop the demise of an infantile product

Bebo is on the brink: acquired by AOL in 2008 for $850 million (!), the anti-social network for "Generation 10 and under" (or the equivalent IQ) had its membership in the US dwindle from 5.8 million a year ago to 5.1 million now; in the UK, where consumers are less savvy and educated, membership stagnates around 5 million. Ernst & Young put the current value of Bebo at $62 million but warned America Online not to expect a sales price of the unit above $45 million.

That puts the true value of Bebo currently 94.7% below the price that AOL has paid in September 2008. It shows that AOL is run by true idiots who are only marginally above the level of many Anglochat fuckwits such as Eviyavol, Campiekat1, Crosseykind (pictured from top to bottom: the Sow, the Fugly and the Broody), KKend4095, Brandi620, Christielakev63, KMHii, Lameducks, etc... numpties that have been featured here before. The range of these Bebo members reaches from welfare fraudsters, some accused of child abuse and neglect and personal insolvency, to thieves, robbers, biker convicts and other criminals (paedophiles like lister69 or Kevinbernhard).

AOL finally had enough. After the Time-Warner fiasco, when AOL bought and sold that conglomerate at a loss of a staggering $102 billion within four years, the appetite to carry along another loss making entity is gone. Bebo will be unwound, either sold to the highest bidder within 2 months or simply shut down. The 30 employees in England have already been made redundant, the 42 in the US put on notice.

The reasons for the demise of Bebo are all too obvious. Their attempt to compete with Facebook, which has nearly 400 million members world-wide, was grotesquely megalomaniac. The lack of a viable product - Bebo has never grown out of a childish reincarnation of Sesame Street - and the incapability to respond coherently to AOL members' complaints and requests - often brushed aside with pubescent remarks like "because we can" or "because you want to" - spelled doom for the inferior network from the start. The deliberate violations of members' rights and personal safety issues have resulted in more than 3,000 lawsuits pending or in process. The ridiculously primitive lay-outs remind of a boiler room operation of glue-sniffing High School dropouts rather than of anyone with even most rudimentary market skills. The Feds are investigating accounting practises at both, AOL and Bebo: money laundering is suspected. The suspicion that proceeds from drug-trafficking schemes in Florida were behind the totally overblown purchasing price of Bebo by AOL made headlines even in the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Being dumb might not violate criminal law; but the markets punish idiots mercilessly to run them out of town.

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