When the corporate giants came in, investing huge sums - News Corp's $580m in MySpace, Google's $1.65bn in YouTube and Microsoft's $240m in Facebook - the need to get a return from their investments always meant a move into the media mainstream and a dilution of these sites' anarchistic, unsullied by commercialism, ethos.
What it also demonstrates is how much claptrap has been spouted over the past year or so by proponents of citizen journalism and user-generated content who predicted the death of the scripted, edited, programmed entertainment world as we know it.
What Bebo has recognised is that there is no substitute for professional content that appeals to the many, not the few, which can be supported by advertising. As platforms, social networking and video-sharing sites are a new and vital distribution outlet for content creators and advertisers, providing access to young people who are light consumers of traditional media.
Globally, Bebo has 40 million users, predominantly in the 13 to 24 age group, and, in the UK, has overtaken the mighty Google on page views. The Open Media deal allows broadcasters free access to this community via their own on-site video players with retention of all advertising revenue. Bebo gets increased audience engagement with its site, enhanced brand value and greater return from its own advertisers.
As technology delivers faster broadband speeds linking the web directly into the TV set, the merging of broadcast and online media, and the forming of alliances between the two, will accelerate.
Rather than posing a threat to TV, this development will benefit the current TV advertising model, allowing more efficient micro-targeting of advertising with real interactivity.
TV companies will be able to learn from the experiences of recently announced Facebook and MySpace "hyper-targeting" initiatives.
With 40-inch plasma screens flying off the shelves, this merging of the media will see entertainment return from the computer in the study to the TV set in the living room. And Bebo can stop making Kate Modern and the like and rely on TV companies to supply it with proper content.
Colin Grimshaw is the deputy editor of Media Week.