Bebo, will it shut down?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 7th, 2010 | 1 Comments

AOL are now beginning to see that the investment they made into the social network, Bebo, was a big mistake. So much now that they are either going to shut the site down or look for a new buyer, but it will be unlikely that they will make a profit if they sell it.

Two years ago AOL bought Bebo for 850 million dollars! A lot of money, but back then Bebo was the number one social network in Ireland and the UK. Since then though it seems like Bebo remained pretty static, not a lot changed and it soon became more of a social network for young teens. Having such a younger audience does not always appeal to advertisers because they are less likely to make money from their advertisements.

Other social networks such as Facebook suddenly took over in the past year and with a lot of people signing up to use Facebook they just lost interest in Bebo.

I don't use Bebo anymore, I might log in once every so often but I do not actually use it for talking to friends. Here is a little graph of recent stats for various social networking sites, you can see the decline in Bebo over the past year, almost a 50% drop in unique visits!

I do think that it would be unfortunate to see bebo close, i think that with the right owner it could be turned around but it would require a lot of work. It should be more slimmed down, the content is just too bulky on the site, all other sites seem to be going with the trend of slimming down there sites. Facebook has a nice plain and simple look to it and so too does YouTube, with it's recent upgrade of it's video page it is even more simplistic!

There is however always new and better services coming out and if the current sites do not keep with the times then they are bound to fizzle out like Bebo, when Twitter was launched, Facebook brought out a new, what's on your mind feature, which is the same as what twitter has, by adding this feature Facebook managed to keep their members. Bebo did bring out a new feature like this but it was too late and also it didnt incorporate into the site as well as it did with Facebook.

For Bebo to add that feature they had to make a new "Home" section to their site where you could see recent changes and the new status changes of users (the twitter-like feature).

For now Bebo is still here, by the end of next month (May 2010) we will see if it will close down or be sold as that is when the company's strategic evaluation will end.

One year today

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: March 1st, 2010 | 0 Comments

For the past 12 months now I have managed to make a few blog posts every month. Last march I decided to really take an interest in my blog. I started this off by setting myself the task of blogging consistently for the whole month of March. For the first 7 or 8 months I was doing reasonably well with my blog posting, once it hit December I barely made any posts, I know that during the winter months I work a lot more as I have no college and I think this is reflected on my blog for that period of time, as I would be working until midnight most nights. Now however that is not the case, I am back to working normal hours and really have no excuse not to try and get more posts up more regularly. Just to show what having an interest in your blog and with regular blog postings the stats really do go up! After my first month of blogging, for the full month of march, my blog received 716 unique visits which is incredible compared to what I my blog was receiving before I took an interest. In January 2009 I had only 127 unique visits! So I am really happy that by having an interest in my site it really will pay off, when people come to my site from Google for example, I think it's great, and it is even better when they get what they are looking for and comment! Now since starting blogging regularly my blog's visitor count has rocketed up, my monthly unique visits now average between 12,000 and 13,000 unique visits :D . My daily visitor count is 500 unique visitors on average! This really makes me want to take more interest in my blog once again. If I can increase my traffic that much in one year, it will be interesting to see these same stats in another year. The percentage increase of visitors to my blog compared to the same time last year is just over 8,000%! :o

Here Is May 2009 Stats – Finally!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 23rd, 2009 | 0 Comments

So, it has taken a really long time this month for me to get around to posting these stats for the blog last month. For some reason every time i wanted to get them up on the site i would end up getting sidetracked with something else and then would end up making a post on something else and completely forget to post up my stats. However that is not the case today :D

So in April 2009 my total unique visits to this blog was 851 uniques with a total of 1185 pageviews. That itself was a really good achievement, so far my blog has being staying at a steady incline of visitors, and the month of May was no exception.

So the stats for May 2009 are as follows: 2247 unique visits and 2591 pageviews :o, i think that is just a mental leap upwards from the previous months stats. So that is a 164% increase on last months stats. It is always nice to see a sudden increase.