Bebo to shut down in Australia - report

The Facebook juggernaut has claimed the scalp of AOL Time Warner's US$850 million acquisition of Bebo, with the social media site tipped to close its Australian operation before Christmas as part of a global retreat and rethink.

Bebo's woes follow the troubles Facebook has inflicted on News Corp's one-time darling MySpace, which has been forced to reposition itself as a leader in the online music area and let Facebook dominate the service of broader social networking.

Australians, unlike net users in many other markets, have rapidly given Google and Facebook a near-monopoly position in online search and social networking.

The extent of Facebook's reach in Australia - it accounts for 29 per cent of all time spent online by Australians - has led to research group Nielsen defining the trend as "Facebook Time" and "Non Facebook Time".

"It's just phenomenal," said Nielsen Online's director of analytics, Mark Higginson. "Every time I run those numbers I have to double check. Australians are spending nearly a third of all their time browsing the internet on Facebook alone."

In October, Australian users spent 27.2 hours browsing online and 7.55 hours of the total was sucked up by Facebook. MySpace managed just 39 minutes and Twitter 17 minutes.

And in Australian figures released for the first time to the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Facebook said its Australian users in October had uploaded 80 million pictures and written 32 million "wall posts" and 45 million "status updates".

"Status updates are the invention of the decade," Mr Higginson said.

If more Facebook hype is needed, Nielsen has also crunched global data which shows Australia now leads the world for time spent each month on social media sites (7.12 hours), ahead of Britain, Italy, North America and Japan.

"Traditionally Australia looks to the rest of the world in terms of who leads the internet and how stuff develops but in social media, we are leading everyone else in the amount of time we are spending there," Mr Higginson said.

According to Nielsen NetView for October, Facebook's "unique audience" in Australia was 8.1 million, followed by YouTube on 5.8 million and Wikipedia (5.2 million). MySpace was steady on 2.3 million users while Bebo lagged well behind on 358,000.

Bebo's local boss, Francisco Cordero, refused to confirm or deny the closure of the Australian operation, saying he was "under instructions" to refer media queries to a global communications spokeswoman in London, who did not respond to queries.

However, Bebo has already started informing Australian partners of its exit, which is due in part to Facebook. Bebo has appealed mainly to teen users but its bigger rival appears to be muscling in on the younger crowd, too.

"I just really can't say much about that," Mr Cordero said. "Bebo didn't compete with Facebook, it was really only MySpace but now Facebook is reaching across all demographics."

Facebook's Australian boss, Paul Borrud, said the site's fastest-growing user base were people aged more than 35. "The growth is very strong there," he said.