Yahoo is reportedly preparing a $1 billion takeover bid for social networking site Bebo. The MySpace rival was founded by husband and wife team Michael and Xochi Birch in 2005, and has overtaken MySpace in the UK as the most popular social networking site although globally, MySpace is still around four times greater. Bebo has around 25 million registered users. It is rumoured that Bebo turned down a £300m offer from BT and a similar bid from Viacom last year, and Michael Birch has said in the past that he would rather float Bebo than sell it. Yahoo has already shown its keenness to break into the social networking market with a bid to buy out Facebook last year, also for $1bn, which fell through. Yahoo declined to comment on what it refers to as "industry rumours".