MySpace, Bebo Show How Quickly Once Mighty Social Networks Can Fall
In case anyone needed a reminder that even the biggest social nets can transform into ephemera in record time, the news of the week might do the trick. Two of the big, early players in the category -- MySpace and Bebo -- proved their current worth, or lack thereof.
In the case of Bebo, it comes down to raw dollars and cents. The social network, which was bought by AOL (pre current CEO Tim Armstrong) for $850 million was sold for an estimated $10 million to a turnaround firm called Criterion Capital Partners. Armstrong said the company will get a "meaningful tax deduction" from the sale. Ya think? The term "fire sale" somehow doesn't do justice to the fact that AOL is selling Bebo for a mere $840 million less than it paid.
Over at MySpace, another top exec hired to turn around the struggling News Corp. property is leaving: Jason Hirschhorn (above). It's been only four months since Hirschhorn was named co-president, a rank he was lifted to in the wake of the departure of Owen Van Natta, who vacated the CEO's job after less than a year at the helm. It's not like Hirschhorn got a better offer -- it is being painted by Hirschhorn, and MySpace execs as a personal decision to move back to the east coast -- but the facts speak for themselves.
Two of the three execs appointed by News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller in April 2009 to help turn around MySpace have now left. Only Mike Jones, co-president with Hirschhorn, remains. Hirschhorn isn't even sticking around until a planned redesign of the site launches later this year. If it hadn't already, it seems that MySpace has moved into the realm of the unfixable, just like Bebo.
All of which is to say that Facebook, which is closing in on 500 million users, and Twitter, which has hosted more than 10 billion tweets, aren't exactly impossible to unseat as the rulers of social networking. The chance that your business could suddenly implode seems the obvious by-product of the category's dynamism. The New York Times caught a lot of heat this week when it suggested the word "tweet" had "not yet achieved the status of standard English" and that it was always possible the word "may fade into oblivion" if Twitter ceased to be. The experiences of Bebo and MySpace prove the Times has a point.
Photo via TechCrunch. Previous coverage of social networks at BNET Media: