Bebo relaunches, but is the app actually any good? Let's find out!
After some muted hype, long forgotten social media platform Bebo has returned in a whole new form, an app that imaginatively animates its users messages. But is it any good? Jam's managing director, Richard Costa-D'sa takes a look.
I felt something approaching fond nostalgia this morning as I remembered the heady days of the mid-naughties when social media first exploded onto the scene. Bebo were a big player back then with over 11 million UK users on their social networking platform. In a smart move they sold to AOL for $850m at the height of their popularity. A few spectacularly unfruitful years later AOL must have been smarting when the founders bought back the platform for just $1m. If nothing else you have to take your hats off to a business strategy that means you make $849m and keep the platform. Smart or not, it’s clear that there’s no longer space for a platform like Bebo in its original incarnation in a market dominated by better networks with huge scale like Facebook and YouTube.
It’s no surprise then that the Bebo team’s new foray into this space is trying to break into the hotter market of over-the-top messaging. Playing in the OTT market rather than pure-play social network on the face of it is a smart strategic move by the original founders. They’ve clearly launched their new product (still called Bebo, though with no clear connection to the original platform) to take advantage of three trends impacting their millennial audience. It’s designed for smartphones first, the primary medium for communication is visual, and it allows for smart and fast personalisation of those visuals.
The application itself is easy to setup and clearly designed for a teenage audience. It has a clean (if slightly simplistic) UI, but the product itself is unfortunately very light on depth or originality. Beyond the #hashtag animations of your copy, it doesn’t really bring much new. It has all the bits you’d expect - 1-to-1 and group chats, however, criminally does not have video functionality, which is almost a pre-requisite now. As with all messaging applications it is driven by your friends being on it. So being one of the early adopters doesn’t really pay back on this occasion.
The new Bebo follows in the footsteps of Blab (the video messaging application they launched earlier this year) and is clearly targeted towards an emoji-hungry younger audience, trying to fill the latest ‘cool space’ that Facebook and Twitter can’t authentically occupy with this audience.
Building Bebo as a suite of applications (three at first) will also allow it to start to cross-promote users between its apps, building its base incrementally and creating interesting advertising solutions, which I’d assume will increase Bebo’s ultimate viability for investors.
Ten years on from the original launch it is now playing in a very different marketplace, looking to the likes of Whatsapp, Snapchat and Viber as its competitors. Trying to tap into a culture focused on visual, rather than text-driven communication and do it in a way that fuels this audience’s growing requirement for immediacy and privacy is a challenge when there are such scale operators already in market. The visuals and the level of personalisation does feel unique, driven by a collaboration of hashtags, cartoon avatars and messages. And the interface is light and fun - it’s clearly not trying to take itself too seriously and that is probably wise given the audience.
However, for all the sound strategic principles that underpin its reinvention there still remains some clear barriers.
Firstly, they are starting from zero. Its new mobile incarnation is not linked to its original social network (nor should it be given the product), therefore it will not be moving it’s once millions of users into the new application. Clearly there is some brand equity left in the market (albeit only $1m and with the wrong audience!), but a year into first attempt Blab and numbers dwindling on that application, Bebo will clearly not be an immediate success building on heritage to get a leg up.
Secondly, the application’s differentiator is the clever use of animated hashtags. It’s a type of personalisation that’s limited by templates, and that feels a bit dated for today’s youth audience. From my first plays on the application I found it doesn’t deliver the animated and therefore unique product experience enough of the time to hold attention. Whether Bebo can update this library of visuals enough to prevent the format becoming stale for its users is a big question and I suspect a big challenge. Whilst it has integrated a drawing functionality into the service we’ve already seen this on the likes of Snapchat and I can’t see it being a driver of downloads or usage.
So despite the big bucks and strong heritage I feel it’s going to be a steep challenge to make this new app a success. Bebo is stepping into a competitive market and trying to connect with an audience that knows nothing of it’s past with a product that doesn’t, in my opinion, add significant incremental value for users compared to the huge players with millions of users already there.
But then given they made 99 per cent profit on their business the first time around, maybe we should take a punt.