Bebo appoints Charkin as head of sales for UK and Ireland

Charkin will be tasked with building the ad sales business across the two markets, and creating a platform to increase Bebo's profile.

Prior to joining Bebo, Charkin oversaw MSN's EMEA regional sales business. Its success led to the model being adopted for the company's sales teams in Asia, Latin America and the US.

He has nine years' experience in the online sales industry, and was UK sales manager at Lycos before joining MSN.

Charkin said: "Bebo is attracting great new brands and innovative agencies, presenting me with the chance to play a key part in helping to define the new rules of pull marketing."

Jim Scheinman, vice-president of business development and sales at Bebo, added: "Mark will help redefine what advertisers can expect from today's advertising and work with them in a very deep way to engage consumers."

Bebo's co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch reportedly received an approach from Viacom to acquire the site in July, after the US media giant lost out on the sale of MySpace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m.

Since then, the race to acquire social networking and user generated content websites has heated up considerably, with Google snapping up YouTube for $1.67bn (£887m), prompting Yahoo! to up its pursuit of Facebook.

However, it was reported earlier in the week that Yahoo's! negotiations with Facebook were making slow progress, after the search giant appeared reluctant to increase its $1bn offer.

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