Just read courtesy of Guy Kawasaki pointing it out to me.

AOL has announced its intention to buy Bebo for £425 million.  AOL+Bebo now have a combined membership/audience of around the 80 million mark which when compared to Facebook’s 67 million is bigger.

However that being said in the largest English speaking markets - the US, and Britian Bebo is in 3rd place and growth is either anaemic or growing slowly when compared to Facebook and MySpace in those markets.

Looking above at Compete’s ‘people’ count you can see that traffic in the US from Bebo has no traction among the population. Facebook and Myspace are on the other hand holding steady or growing slightly but MySpace is already the king so to be fair it is more difficult to grow once you have 60 million users (mostly in the US).

*Note - Compete stats are heavily weighted to the US audience; this is intentional on their part.

What I find surprising is how little AOL managed to pay for Bebo because if one just considers ’scale’ and this will double the size of AOLs audience then AOLs ad-network should see a dramatic improvement.  By the way this doesn’t even remotely consider the fact that Bebo’s users are the most active of all Social Media networks.

Looking at this other Compete data (above) in which I swapped out Bebo for AOL shows that in the US the purchase of Bebo will mean AOL will in fact have the largest active user-base which means the largest Ad-network.

Looking at the world and Europe where Bebo had an early strong presence in the UK but now is the only one of the Big 3 to have a clear strategy for the rest of Europe, my impression from this is that there is a good chance Bebo will grow dramatically outside the US/UK markets and possibly with AOL in the US/UK zones too.

What do you think?  Who is the winner here?