Myspace was only the beginning

Read this on techcrunch today:

San Francisco based Bebo popped a
few bottles of champagne and announced a very healthy $15 million round
of financing, led by Benchmark Capital. Bebo is one of the largest and
fastest growing social networks, with 24 million users and 2.5 billion
page views per month.

More from PaidContent and Jeff Clavier.

This is a deeply funded market niche. Market leader Myspace is owned by News Corp. Facebook is funded to the hilt. Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins (and Benchmark before the recap). Newcomer Tagworld raised a healthy $7.5 million from DFJ. And tagged, focused on much younger audiences, raised $7m from Mayfield.

Bebo is focusing on non-U.S. growth, particularly the UK. That makes
a lot of sense. The U.S. market is completely saturated between Myspace
and Facebook.

If you can’t add that fast, let me help you. That’s 29.5 million dollars that has just been invested in online social sites. Myspace was only the beginning. We better find a way to use these tools in the classroom or we are going to loose our students to a social world. If we think banning these sites is an option whether through laws like DOPA or by filtering think again. Bebo has 2.5 billion pages viewed per month…I wonder how many of those are during school?

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