San Francisco — AOL’s popular teen and young adult social-networking site Bebo, on Monday announced the expansion of its reach to include five new European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, offering premium video content via media partners, its first major expansion outside the English-speaking world, the company said Monday.
Owned by America Online, previously, Bebo has local presence (translated sites) for countries like Ireland, the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Poland, which claims to have captured more than 22 million users worldwide, and almost half of it from Britain alone, but now it plans to use IP-based geo-targetting to cater services in users’ mother tongues.
Recently it launched a latino site for U.S.-based users. Bebo will offer sites in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as it attempts to broaden its user base.
Facebook is currently the fastest growing social-networking sites, catering to the 40 language versions of the online community.
Successfully launching social services across Europe is never an easy task to accomplish, and Netlog and Facebook have a pretty strongest presence here, as does MySpace, although the latter appears to be struggling with their expansion strategy lately.
Nevertheless, Bebo commands a strong foothold in the U.K. market and has about 22 million unique visitors per month, according to January figures from comScore, However, Bebo lags in user numbers behind social networking giants Facebook and MySpace.
Bebo has recently partnered with AlloCiné, which plans to begin four channels for the U.K. and four other channels aimed at continental Europe. The channels will have films and other programs, Bebo said. Bebo’s other content partners include Germany’s Clipfish, a video portal. Channels will include video horoscopes, celebrity interviews and reviews of major German movie releases. Another media supplier, Filmtrailer, will deliver Hollywood films in local languages for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
It also plans to incorporate its Open Media platform, which will allow media companies to seamlessly distribute content on Bebo’s network.
Recently, Bebo also included RSS functionality to its site, so members can pull in social media from other sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace with Bebo Lifestream and its Open Media Platform.
“The proven achievement of our platform in the UK and Ireland positions us well to expand into these dynamic continental European markets,” said Nicole Vanderbilt, VP International, Bebo.
“The social-networking audience is growing rapidly, and our new sites will allow local users to connect with other users, entertainment and brands, both globally and locally.”
From Monday onwards users will be able to select French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.
“We think there are lot of opportunities in the Western European market, both for user potential and for monetization,” Vanderbildt said in a statement.
“International expansion is an important part of our growth strategy,” she said, adding that Bebo had “very ambitious plans” for the European market.
Once a niche for teenagers and technophiles, social networking has exploded into the mainstream, with industry research suggesting more people logged on to membership community websites than e-mail services in December.
Globally, more than 240 million people used a social networking service in December, according to figures from Nielsen online.
During last year, Bebo dropped off from third to eighth position in the global social networking market, according to the research firm comScore.
Vanderbildt said she was confident Bebo could reverse the trend.
“It is a fast changing market,” she said. “If you look back two years ago the leaders then are totally different than the leaders now.”
“The richness of our experience lies in the user’s ability to express him or herself — as apparent in our new Lifestory feature — and in the ability to connect to people, media and brands through the Lifestream and our Open Media Platform,” Vanderbilt explained.
Bebo is also considering to allow media partners to add a button on their sites that lets users share content on their profiles. Shared content triggers a new status update on a profile, which notifies their friends and potentially drives hits back to those publisher sites.
Bebo was acquired by AOL in March 2008 for US$850 million as part of AOL’s plan to move away from being an ISP and more of an advertising-focused content provider.