Google Acquires Meebo for $100 Million

Sites include Google.com , meebo.com . Published on June 25th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Meebo has done a lot of pivoting since it launched 7 years ago but all that twisting and turning has paid off—at least for its founders. Google has acquired the former chat service turned ad-platform for a whopping $100 million.

The plan on the surface at least, is to integrate some Meebo technology as well as get some of its development expertise put into Google+. That’s the good news. The bad news is that some of the staff at Meebo will need to find new jobs. There are reportedly planned layoffs in the sales and marketing departments—Google after all, doesn’t need any help with marketing, or sales.

Meebo presently has over 100 million monthly active users and there is speculation that Google will try to entice them to sign up to Google+ (if they aren’t already on the platform). If this does happen, it could fuel some growth in Google+ and with the viral toolbar of Meebo installed on millions of websites, another avenue for marketing Google+ is surely on the cards.

Social as you may know is facing an uncertain future at the moment; Facebook is freefalling on the markets and there seems to be ‘user fatigue’ among social networkers. Whether Meebo will help Google survive this malaise remains to be seen, but we’ll be watching.