What happened to Bebo?

By Obscure Internet 17 Oct 2026 8 min read

Bebo closed for good in 2026. Its founder, Michael Birch, sold it to AOL for $850 million in 2008, bought it back for $1 million in 2013, and brought it back to life more than once. After one last comeback in the spring of 2026, he shut it down himself, with a farewell letter on the home page and a pointer to his next app, Bluebell.

If you were a teenager in Britain, Ireland or New Zealand in the mid-2000s, that’s the end of a very long story. It starts with a skin, a whiteboard and a list of your top 16 friends, rearranged, as Birch put it, “with the delicacy of peace negotiations”.

EXHIBIT

What was Bebo?

Bebo was a social network, and for a few years it was the social network if you were at school in the UK. Michael and Xochi Birch, a husband-and-wife team who’d already built a birthday-reminder service called BirthdayAlarm, launched it from their house in San Francisco in January 2005. The name was said to stand for “Blog early, blog often”.

From the museum

After a relaunch as a social network that summer, its front page in August 2005 pitched it at college students and alumni first, and everyone else second. The pitch is very 2005: find people from your college, “write and draw on other peoples’ White Boards”, and “waste time and avoid doing any real work”. Everyone came anyway.

What made Bebo different from MySpace?

Bebo was easier. On MySpace, making your page look different meant pasting in code you didn’t understand. Bebo gave you ready-made backgrounds called skins, so a thirteen-year-old with no idea what HTML was could have a page covered in glitter, band logos or footballers in about a minute.

Then there were the bits everyone remembers:

• The whiteboard. A little drawing pad on your profile where friends could scribble you a picture. Most of them were terrible. That was the point.
• Top 16. You ranked your friends, in public. Moving someone from first to fifth said more than any message ever could.
• Luv. You got a small number of hearts each day to give away, and you could “Share the Luv” with your favourite people. Running out of luv was a real problem.
• Quizzes. Homemade quizzes about yourself, which your friends then failed.

When ITV News reported Bebo’s return in 2021, the replies were full of exactly these memories, from rows about who’d made someone’s top friends to fighting over the daily love hearts.

Bebo also tried to be a television channel. In July 2007 it launched KateModern, a drama made by the team behind YouTube’s lonelygirl15, which played out on Bebo itself and drew more than 1.5 million views a week. In 2007 that was a remarkably bold idea for a social network.

How big was Bebo?

In the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, enormous. In August 2006, Hitwise reported that Bebo had passed MySpace in weekly UK visits for the first time, and that it was already the biggest social network in New Zealand. In comScore’s figures for July 2007, Bebo was the most visited social network in the UK, with 10.6 million visitors to MySpace’s 10.1 million.

The Scotsman later reported that at its 2006 peak, Bebo got more hits in the UK than the BBC website. When AOL bought it, Bebo said it had more than 40 million members worldwide and was the number one social network in Ireland and New Zealand.

New Zealand loved it most of all. According to the man who ran Bebo there from 2007, it wasn’t just the country’s biggest social network, it had more page views than any other website in the country. Two-thirds of secondary school pupils were estimated to have a Bebo page in 2007, and schools blocked it to stop them logging in during lessons. Even the Electoral Enrolment Centre gave its mascot, the Orange Guy, a Bebo profile for the 2008 election.

The warning sign was in the same comScore report. Facebook had 7.6 million UK visitors in July 2007, and it had grown 366 percent since January.

Did Bebo really message aliens?

It did. In 2008 Bebo ran a competition called A Message From Earth, asking its users what they’d like to say to extraterrestrials. On 9 October 2008, about 500 of the entries, photos, drawings and text messages, were turned into binary and beamed from a giant radio telescope at Evpatoria in Ukraine towards a planet about 20 light years away. Any reply wouldn’t reach Earth for 40 years, so there’s still time.

Why did AOL buy Bebo for $850 million?

On 13 March 2008, AOL announced it would buy Bebo for $850 million in cash. AOL wanted a social network to bolt onto its instant messengers, AIM and ICQ. Together they’d reach around 80 million people, a direct challenge to MSN Messenger. AOL’s chief executive, Randy Falco, called Bebo “the perfect complement” to AOL. The Birches, who owned most of the company, walked away with around $595 million.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Facebook had already overtaken Bebo and MySpace as the most visited social network in Britain in the summer of 2007, according to Hitwise. Within months of the sale, the financial crisis hit. In New Zealand, AOL closed Bebo’s local advertising team, and Facebook soon took over there too. By 2010, Nielsen found that just 4 percent of New Zealand internet users named Bebo as their main social network.

Falco was out of AOL less than a year after the deal, partly because of what he’d paid for Bebo. Jeff Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, AOL’s parent company, publicly admitted that it had paid too much.

What happened to Bebo after AOL?

In April 2010, a memo leaked from AOL saying it was “evaluating strategic alternatives, which could include a sale or shutdown of Bebo”. In June it sold Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners, an investment firm, reportedly for $10 million or less. The deal did have one upside for AOL: it could write off what it had paid for tax purposes.

Bebo didn’t recover. In May 2013 it filed for bankruptcy protection, and on 1 July 2013 Michael and Xochi Birch bought it back for $1 million, about 0.1 percent of what AOL had paid. Birch announced it on Twitter: “We just bought Bebo back for $1m. Can we actually re-invent it? Who knows, but it will be fun trying…”

The reinvention took several forms. Bebo came back as a messaging app, then as tools for gamers to stream themselves playing. In June 2019, Twitch, the game-streaming service owned by Amazon, bought what was left: about ten staff and the technology. Sources told TechCrunch it cost under $25 million and that Twitch had to outbid Discord.

Did Bebo ever come back?

Twice more. In January 2021, bebo.com announced that “Bebo is coming back in February 2021 as a brand new social network”. Birch said he’d been coding it himself during lockdown, and the coming-soon page trended on Twitter in Ireland. The bad news came in the same announcement: “all old data and photos were lost many years ago and are not recoverable.”

That version never made it out of its invite-only test. By the summer of 2022, the home page carried a note from Birch: “We tried our best to resurrect Bebo.” Asked whether it would ever rise again, he answered his own question: “Who knows. It has now lived four times, been sold twice. Hmm.”

It rose again in the spring of 2026, for one last go.

Is Bebo closed now?

Yes, and this time on purpose. In 2026 the home page was replaced by a letter from Michael Birch that begins: “Bebo is closed.” He wrote that Bebo had ended before, through “sales, auctions, quiet fades”, and that none of those endings had been done properly. This one was: “on purpose, from me, with more gratitude than I know what to do with.”

EXHIBIT

The letter remembers Bebo as the place where, for a stretch of the 2000s, “in Britain, Ireland and New Zealand especially”, friendship lived online. It ends by inviting old users to his new app, Bluebell, a mix of messaging and social network with no feed of strangers, and with a last line any Bebo user will recognise: “Share the luv, one last time”.

Can you get your old Bebo photos back?

Sadly not. When Bebo announced its 2021 return, it said plainly that all the old data and photos had been lost years earlier and couldn’t be recovered. If your Bebo photos survive anywhere, it’s on an old phone, a forgotten hard drive or a friend’s Facebook. Bits of the public site live on in the Wayback Machine, which is where this exhibit’s artefacts came from.

Bebo: a timeline

• January 2005: Michael and Xochi Birch launch Bebo from their home in San Francisco.
• August 2006: Bebo passes MySpace in weekly UK visits, according to Hitwise.
• July 2007: KateModern launches on Bebo. Bebo is the UK’s most visited social network in comScore’s July figures.
• Summer 2007: Facebook overtakes both Bebo and MySpace in Britain, according to Hitwise.
• 13 March 2008: AOL announces it’s buying Bebo for $850 million in cash.
• 9 October 2008: A Message From Earth beams about 500 Bebo users’ messages into space.
• June 2010: AOL sells Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners, reportedly for $10 million or less.
• May 2013: Bebo files for bankruptcy protection.
• 1 July 2013: The Birches buy Bebo back for $1 million.
• June 2019: Twitch buys Bebo’s team and technology.
• January 2021: Bebo announces a comeback. It never leaves its test phase.
• 2022: “We tried our best to resurrect Bebo.”
• Spring 2026: One last comeback.
• 2026: “Bebo is closed.”

For more from the years of nudges, away messages and top friends, wander back through the Messenger Years.

From the museum