Calling All Content: Bebo Wants You

Social media network Bebo recently reaffirmed its commitment to being a content hub by announcing plans for “a minimum of” six original productions in 2009. The company also delineated out its programming categories: Bebo Originals like Sofia’s Diary and Kate Modern, third-party productions, and Open Media deals, which encompass the gray area in between. The moves all speak to Bebo’s dedication to attracting as much good content as possible — no matter who owns it — and highlights the site’s status, thanks to its 45 million-strong audience, as a force to be reckoned with.

Sarah Gavin of Bebo

I met recently with Bebo’s director of global communications, Sarah Gavin, along with representatives from British production company Channel X (Vic n’ Bob, Jonathan Ross), at the company’s office in London’s SoHo district. We mostly talked about Chelsey OMG, which Channel X launched Monday on Bebo as an Open Media partner (check out our full review on NewTeeVee Station). Gavin also laid out Bebo’s upcoming plans for the media side — both in-house and externally.

The six original series Bebo will be commissioning for 2009 will screen one at a time, occupying the featured slot on the front page and benefiting from the full force of Bebo promotion. According to Gavin, they’ll range from “O.C.-lite,” short-form programming, such as sketch comedy-style shows, to “event commissions.” Gavin referred to event commissions as “experimental, risk-taking” series that will last some three months each, with one running in spring, the other, in the fall.

The original series will continue to share space on the front page with Bebo’s Open Media content, a program that launched in November 2007 and has since grown to include more than 500 partners. The program was created in order to give outside producers access to the Bebo audience while allowing Belo to maintain control over their content. “The monetization rules around each show will be different depending on the format — what might work for Chelsey might not work for a comedy sketch show,” Gavin said.

For Chelsey, the launch strategy in play includes debuting without sponsorship, then allowing the show to build an audience before seeking advertisers. And once those sponsorship deals come in, who keeps the revenue depends on who’s initially responsible for generating it: “When partnering with big companies,” according to Gavin, “if the partner company brings in the sponsor, the partner keeps the revenue, but if Bebo brings in the sponsorship, there’d be a split.” This is a system that works for Open Media projects because of the external funding; Chelsey is funded by the UK Digital Rights Group.

This strategy of bringing in quality content, no matter the source, came about through a bit of reverse engineering, according to Gavin: “When we took a step back [last year] and looked at who Bebo was and what our users were doing, we found that it was very much around self-expression, and using great content as part of that expression. But there’s so much other great content out there that to be able to take that content and give it a home became the next part of our strategy.” Hence the search for new partners of all levels — leading to a diverse array of content, tailored to Bebo’s young-leaning users. World domination is likely to follow.