Bebo has announced the appointment of Mark Charkin as Head of Sales UK & Ireland. The former Head of EMEA Regional Sales for MSN was responsible for growing and developing MSN’s pan-regional sales business. In his new role Charkin will build the advertising sales business for Bebo in the UK and Ireland.

Charkin said of his appointment: “This is a truly unique opportunity to work on a great site and to help develop Bebo’s business from the grass-roots level up.”

What I find most interesting about this announcement is the trend that appears to be forming. In the past few months Google, Yahoo and MSN have all lost key executives from their teams to new Web 2.0 start-ups. For example Natalie Mead (MSN) to VP of Marketing at AutoQuake, Kate Burns (Google UK, MD) to AdLink, Ed Freyfogle and Philip Wilkinson (Yahoo) to Nestoria and CrowdStorm repsectively.

I think we will see a lot more of this “back to startup” mentality as the web 1.0 portals become less important and the web 2.0 social networks supercede them.