Yahoo! Tapped By Bebo For Ad Supply

There’s Facebook, there’s MySpace, and then there’s Bebo.

A hit in the eastern end of the western world (I don’t believe that’s entirely politically correct to say, but I’ll say it anyhow) Bebo is a social network dominant in a region where euros and quid are the currencies of choice – and a quickly growing and expanding one, at that.

It has already managed to nearly equal the #2 social network in the world (Facebook) in terms of the sum of its membership (those statistics of course aren’t as relevant today as they were several season ago, but just for the sake of a general comparison, I’ll bring them into the fold), and for the sake of longevity, it appears as if Bebo genuinely has a long way to go before it tops out. Which is great news for Yahoo!, given the fact that both companies just today announced a partnership in which the Bebo will grant almost all advertising space to Yahoo! placements.

Wait, you say, Yahoo! got the gig? Yahoo!? (Keeping things in perspective, Google has an ad deal with MySpace, and Microsoft has an agreement with Facebook.)

Yes, that’s right, Yahoo! is to be the purveyor of banners and things on Bebo moving forward. If I may say so, this is pretty big frickin’ news.

For Yahoo!, that is. I don’t think it means much for Bebo, as long as it gets the most revenue possible from the deal. (I’m certain that Yahoo! has given Bebo’s administrators plenty of financial reason to pick them over the seemingly unchallenged king of Web ads.)

Yahoo! has for a long time been struggling to pick itself up off the ground and get its monstrous rats nest of a behind moving in the right direction. It’s been years since the company has posed any significant challenge to Google, what with the all too predictable follow-the-leader-like strategy it’s employed since the tech world collectively shifted into the 21st Century. Even recently, Yahoo! made public its plans to purchase the independent ad networks Right Media Inc and BlueLithium for a grand total of roughly $1bn shortly after Google made its $3.1 billion reservation for DoubleClick Inc.

So despite this ad contract being a kind of one-off success for Yahoo!, it’s definitely a much needed boost for the ol’ morale machine. After the replacement of long-time CEO Terry Semel (brought in to spearhead an entertainment-centric strategy back in the ‘90s, which just so happened to be far too early before the Web 2.0 movement even had a chance to lay some roots) with Jerry Yang, one of the company’s founders, the company needed a jolt to its core, and this partnership with Bebo might be just the thing to get operations on a much more sound, and much more forward-thinking footing.

Of course, if the social networking universe goes belly up in a couple of years, Yahoo! might fight itself back at square one, but until that happens, I’ll call this good news for old Yeller.