The International social networking scene just refuses to die down. After the astronomical valuation of facebook by Microsoft another social network bebo.com which we had covered earlier here has been bought over by AOL in an all cash deal worth 850 million $.

Lets put this deal into perspective with whats happening in the social networking scene in the US. To understand why AOL would shell out 850 Million $ in cash for a social network one needs to look at the numbers. Techcrunch did some number crunching and here are some of the stats: Bebo is the second largest social network in the U.K. (its largest market) after Facebook. Comscore data says Bebo has 22 million unique visitors and 11 billion page views; AOL said Bebo users spend an average of 40 minutes a day on the site in a press briefing. Bebo claims 40 million users!

My 14 year old cousin is on bebo and I guess its not such a bad bet to buy a social network that is built on young teens. On the whole this does indicate global potential in social networking but when one looks at the Indian scene one realises that India has a long way to go when it comes to even internet penetration. Bebo claims 40 million users and all of India has just 40 million users! I guess Indian networks can just make claims of being bought for less than 10 million rather than more as of now.

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