I don't think that's true. They had a lot of people using their messenger client.

More to do with mistakes and execution. Why did they take $70m in funding? That's a ridiculous amount of investment to take.

Why couldn't they monetize that amount of eyeballs?

Or go beyond monetizing eyeballs. Turn it into a live chat service, so visitors to your website can instantly communicate with you. Or do what Chatterous did and let people create custom IM group chats. Maybe they did these things and I didn't notice, but anything seems better than 'Let's put a toolbar at the bottom of other peoples' sites!'

Yeah, they had that back in 2007. Meebo bar appeared in Dec 2009.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meebo#Timeline

They went after the low hanging fruit, I imagine.

I know they had a lot of users, but I don't see how they were making money off the client and they had a lot of employees.

Maybe the spam thing was working for them but I don't think they would have folded if so.

Sure. They had way too much investment, way too many employees, and didn't seem to have much of a handle on making money by the looks of things.

It'll be spun as a success "Acquired by Google yay!", but seems a pretty resounding failure to me.

They have now announced shutdown of the messenger. http://www.meebo.com/support/article/175/

it's very difficult to monetize eyeballs without intent. If you're going to do that, you'd better do what fb did, and generate a fuckton [1] of pageviews.

[1] Definition: lots and lots -- 1T / month in summer 2011 [2]

[2] http://mashable.com/2011/08/24/facebook-1-trillion-pageviews...

Depends. It's easy to make a comfortable amount of money even without intent, but the problem comes when you have massive outgoings (office, staff, etc), and tons of investment, where making a good amount of revenue isn't good enough.