Yahoo rumoured to be buying Bebo

21 May 2007 13:48 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Yahoo maybe about to buy UK social networking site Bebo for $1bn the Sunday Telegraph is reporting.

The rumoured bid comes amid a flurry of internet-related deals, which has seen lots of sales of internet start-ups this year already including dpreview.com to Amazon.com, Google buying DoubleClick, and most recently Microsoft's announced buyout of aQuantive, an online advertising technology business, for $6bn.

Bebo has around 25m users worldwide, compared with MySpace's 100m or so registered users, but a sale would still propel the sites founder Michael Birch into the millionaire internet group.

Birch is rumoured to have turned down an offer from BT worth about £300m last summer.

Viacom, the US media giant, which was outbid for MySpace, is also believed to have made an offer last year. Bebo is backed by Benchmark Capital, the private equity firm.

It's not the first internet social networking site Yahoo has been associated with. Last year it made a $1bn bid for Facebook. The offer was rejected by the site's founder, Mark Zuckerberg at the time.

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