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AOL Dumps $1.2 Billion Worth of Acquisitions

Posted by samzenpus on from the excess-inventory dept.

destinyland writes "The social networking site Bebo is being sold for just 'a small fraction of the $850 million AOL paid for the site two years ago,' according to the Wall Street Journal. Since its acquisition, 'the site has been shedding users as fast as Facebook and Twitter have been gaining them,' according to one industry observer, quoting an April memo reportedly sent by an AOL executive arguing that Bebo 'has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space.' Bebo's traffic is already down 44% from last year, according to the Wall Street Journal, attracting just 5 million unique US visitors in May (versus 130.4 million for Facebook). And earlier this month, AOL shed the instant messaging service ICQ for $187.5 million — which it had acquired in 1998 for over $408 million."

2 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Selling ICQ? Really? by captainpanic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Agreed. ICQ is nice technology. I certainly prefer it to MSN.

    However (this is a big "however"), the quality of social software is NOT its most important feature. The most important feature is popularity. And MSN and Skype are simply more popular. Unless that decrease in popularity is reversed, the ICQ ship is sinking. It may sink slowly, but it's inevitably sinking.
    It may be a wise decision to sell it for about 200 million. Another company that is better at marketing may now attempt to either find a niche for ICQ, or to turn mainstream chat focus back to ICQ. It's got a catchy name already, it could work.

    I never really understood why people preferred MSN over ICQ.

  2. Here is how they erased it from entire .TR by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now, here is a very unknown and interesting thing. Turkey is also 16th country with largest online population. I also heard it is 5th largest user of Facebook.

    ICQ was the de-facto messaging standard here and AOL genius management/admins, instead of fixing their systems with basic bayesian filtering/speed triggers/spam reporting, blocked the ENTIRE country IP block from accessing the servers. For couple of months, people played around with proxies, open proxies resulting in a way bigger issue as some of those open proxies are actually nice honeypots for passwords operated by bad guys acting like stupid.

    Soon, people stared to their desktop and they have seen they actually have another instant messenger pre-installed by MS (windows messenger) which they previously joked as it is like stone age compared to features ICQ offers. All launched it regardless of how backwards it is and let me tell you what happened now: 35 million Microsoft messenger/live _active_ users in Turkey. That number is so high that, MS had to double check their statistics system. Today, you can even get Live messenger IDs of small grocery shops in villages to order stuff "online".

    I still run ICQ on my handheld etc. and guess what? Weeks after Russian acquisition, ICQ spam problem is down from daily/hourly to weekly. So, it could be fixed...

    It is not like AIM had any existence in Turkey so, "conspiracy to kill ICQ" is not valid. Unfortunate thing is, MS "Live", that backwards thing became the king because of them.