Chatting with the new king of chat rooms
The Bebo website is one of the hottest properties on the internet, but founders Michael and Xochi Birch have no desire to cash in their chips
WHEN Michael Birch and his wife, Xochi, moved to California in April 2002, they were struggling internet entrepreneurs without enough money to pay for their accommodation.
“We weren’t making any money at the time,” recalled Birch last week on a visit back to London. “That was financially our most difficult period. So we kicked my wife’s parents out of their bedroom and lived there for three months with our two kids.”
Four-and-a-half years later, the company that Michael and Xochi Birch went on to create — www.Bebo.com — is one of the hottest properties on the internet. In less than two years it has acquired more than 27m users and claims to have overtaken MySpace to become the leading social-networking website in the UK and Ireland.
Bebo still has only 15 full-time employees, including four in London, and as yet generates modest revenues from advertising. But its huge and growing audience of young users has prompted suggestions that the business is already worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
Sounds fanciful? It might have been last year, before News Corporation (ultimate owner of The Sunday Times) paid $580m (£310m) for the company behind MySpace. At the time, MySpace had 14m registered users. Today it has more than 100m and is increasingly seen as a powerful advertising medium. Last week, one Wall Street analyst suggested that, within a few years, MySpace could be worth between $10 billion and $20 billion.
Bebo is about a year behind MySpace but seemingly growing every bit as fast. “It’s continuing to grow at a relatively linear rate,” says Birch.
The company recently launched Bebo Bands, which has attracted thousands of musicians to offer their music to the website’s users. A relaunch of the video-hosting feature, Bebo TV, has proved popular, and Birch is working on other ideas to spur “Beboers” to spend even more time on the site.
Source link: timesonline.co.uk..
http://www.bebo.com/
WHEN Michael Birch and his wife, Xochi, moved to California in April 2002, they were struggling internet entrepreneurs without enough money to pay for their accommodation.
“We weren’t making any money at the time,” recalled Birch last week on a visit back to London. “That was financially our most difficult period. So we kicked my wife’s parents out of their bedroom and lived there for three months with our two kids.”
Four-and-a-half years later, the company that Michael and Xochi Birch went on to create — www.Bebo.com — is one of the hottest properties on the internet. In less than two years it has acquired more than 27m users and claims to have overtaken MySpace to become the leading social-networking website in the UK and Ireland.
Bebo still has only 15 full-time employees, including four in London, and as yet generates modest revenues from advertising. But its huge and growing audience of young users has prompted suggestions that the business is already worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
Sounds fanciful? It might have been last year, before News Corporation (ultimate owner of The Sunday Times) paid $580m (£310m) for the company behind MySpace. At the time, MySpace had 14m registered users. Today it has more than 100m and is increasingly seen as a powerful advertising medium. Last week, one Wall Street analyst suggested that, within a few years, MySpace could be worth between $10 billion and $20 billion.
Bebo is about a year behind MySpace but seemingly growing every bit as fast. “It’s continuing to grow at a relatively linear rate,” says Birch.
The company recently launched Bebo Bands, which has attracted thousands of musicians to offer their music to the website’s users. A relaunch of the video-hosting feature, Bebo TV, has proved popular, and Birch is working on other ideas to spur “Beboers” to spend even more time on the site.
Source link: timesonline.co.uk..
http://www.bebo.com/
mljevar - 6. Oct, 00:01