AOL has announced this morning that they have acquired social networking service Bebo for approx £420 million ($850 million). It is a major move considering Yahoo! and other companies had been rumoured to be after the social community. Bebo, the third-largest social networking service in the U.S. behind MySpace and Facebook has also become the social network of choice among British Internet users and those in the Commonwealth, being the #1 social network in Ireland and New Zealand.
For AOL, it brings their ad inventory for Platform-A sky-rocketing upwards with a young adult demographic. AOL has launched 17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008. Bebo will help AOL with these expansion plans.

Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO of AOL was quoted saying, “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media. What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”