Twitch, the Amazon-owned videogame streaming site, has bought Bebo, once the UK’s largest social network, the company confirmed on Tuesday.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the industry site TechCrunch reported that the sale price was $25m (£19m), after a small bidding war with the gaming chat app Discord.
After a series of pivots, Bebo has, since 2017, produced software that lets users stream themselves playing games to Twitch.
Founded in 2005 by the Anglo-American couple Michael and Xochi Birch, Bebo briefly rose to become the most popular social networking site in the UK and Ireland. At its peak, it claimed more than 10 million registered users in the brief interregnum between MySpace’s early growth and Facebook’s domination of the market.
The social network’s unique selling point was the “whiteboard”, which let users post crude mouse-drawn images on each others pages alongside more conventional text and photo posts.
In 2008, AOL acquired the company for $850m, before declaring just two years later that it would shut down the site if it couldn’t find a buyer, citing a lack of profitability of the rapidly declining service.
Three years after that, the Birches bought back control of Bebo for just $1m, attempting to run it as a social network with a built-in messaging app, Blab.
Bebo Blab offered users the ability to have public video chats, on which others could leave comments – leading directly to the company’s final pivot, in 2017. That year, Bebo launched Bebo Streaming Software, an all-in-one app that let gamers stream themselves playing a selection of videogames directly to Twitch.
According to TechCrunch, the acquisition includes both the full staff of Bebo, now made up of about 10 people, and the company’s IP.
Twitch confirmed the acquisition, but declined to comment further. The company, which runs the world’s most popular website for streaming videogames, claims more than half a billion monthly viewers, and a typical concurrent audience of about 1 million people. Twitch has been the launch pad for the success of games including Fortnite, Apex Legends and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, and was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970m.
