Interesting… I really like StumbleUpon. I take it the purpose of the buyout is to buy eyeballs?

I’ve been using them for a while and I like them. They also provide a small but steady stream of visitors to my blog, which is nice.

70 million seems a bit low. I hope they go for more than that…

There is a pretty good article on webpodge that explains why Stumbleupon is worth $50 million plus.

http://webpodge.com/2006/11/15.....0-million/

While I didn’t particularly care for the service itself, I can definitely see why people would like it - StumbleUpon is definitely awesome at what they do.

Congrats to them.

Not to shabby, AOL or eBay? That is quite a toss up. Both need a boost right now.

Rex

I love this application. Hopefully they did shoot higher than $75M

updated post - It’s ebay.

I love StumbleUpon too. It’s always struck me that their targeting would be very affective for something like Digg. With the Digg model, you get a “mob rules” popularity, while with a StumbleUpon targeting model, you’d get like-minded individuals voting up and down articles in a personalized format. Much more useful for people with diverse interests.

Anyway, kudos to them!

I’ve tried StumbleUpon and found it not very useful or fun, but I can see why it might be an interesting feature add-on for eBay.

I just don’t know about eBay… If I was an eBay stock holder, I’d be selling right about now. Like I said, StumbleUpon is a good application, but I don’t see what it has to do with eBay (much like Skype).

However… they could use such services to integrate a level of sociality to the eBay auction site. If they aggregated the relationships found within Skype and StumbleUpon, they would be able to recommend products based on what your network is buying or selling.

Not likely to happen, but it’s a good idea (hint: get some real innovators in your company - do something with your assets)

StumbleUpon + Skype + eBay = zombo.com

Just wait…

Skype 2.0?

Ugh. That pisses me off I love stumble i hate ebay

I used to work at eBay, and I have to say, their management is clueless. Promotions at eBay are done by who-knows-who and seniority, not ability.

Nobody ever talks about buying things on eBay anymore. There are too many better alternatives now, and eBay has lost its coolness factor. It’s actually embarrassing now to admit you are using eBay to buy things. Selling on eBay still makes sense as long as you’re selling trash that you can’t sell anywhere else.

With eBay sales volume no longer growing, the Skype acquisition was an act of total desperation. Skype has nothing to do with the core competency (which admittedly is weak) of eBay. StumbleUpon has even less to do with it.

eBay is dying, but PayPal might save eBay in the end, isn’t that funny? I look forward to the day it’s called “eBay — a PayPal company”.

Very odd. I agree with Robert (#11). Unless they’re tying in the StumbleUpon functionality to “You may like this product so click here,” it seems completely unrelated to eBay.

Alternatively, they could provide eBay auctions based on the suggested sites, but that seems like a nightmare to administer.

why? lol.

I know it’s a stretch, but I wonder if this is similar to Amazon buying Alexa to try to bring traffic/search to their portal.

Here’s something to consider - if $40 million buys the company, what is the value of the potential traffic and product upsell revenue that eBay could generate by owning it’s own search engine?

Think about the TV media costs to run ads for a few months. $40 million in an off-line campaign to attract users isn’t unheard of. So to own 1m uniques per month for the same price?

Don’t think of it as a strategic product buy, think of it as a strategic ad buy. Not necessarily a good one, but…

Hey - eBay isn’t buying eyeballs or traffic, people. They are buying the technology for a DISCOVERY SERVICE to get browsers deeper into eBay and improve the ebay search experience.

http://techfold.com/2007/04/18.....umbleupon/

I am shocked that Yahoo, MSN, Google, or Ask didn’t aquire them. That seemed like a perfect marriage of technologies. Does anyone know if Stumble holds patents to their technology. That would seem to be the only reason why a search would not buy them–if social stumbling could be easily replicated.

I absolutely love StumbleUpon. Once you get into it, you can just spend hours discovering new things on the web. I hope that they don’t lose their magic in this acquisition.

Good luck Garrett, Geoff and Justin!

Interesting point on the “ad buy” Will. congrats to Garret, Geoff and Justin!

I don’t think it necessarily needs to have anything to do with eBay’s central business. The reported price seems like a good price, period, so I don’t see it being a bad decision.

Another development to lend creedence to the eBay rumor. eBay just announced that they would start allowing sellers to link to video hosted on aprroved sites. Since video Stumbling is the driver of all this new traffic to Stumble Upon, I see some product stumbling in our future.

@15: Jason

Where are you getting the idea that eBay is “dying”? I have no clue of the other competitors you are talking about. If there ever is an internet monopoly, eBay is it. I still buy and sell tons of things, books, DVD, electronics, cheap Hong Kong knockoffs of cellphone accesories and I buy and sell them all on eBay or Half.com. Sure I buy some used books from Amazon now and then, but eBay is as strong as ever.

Saying that, the Skype deal must have been proposed by a person who is as dumb as a door knob… I sure hope that guy has been fired from eBay.

I love Stumble and advertise on their system for a few clients. I am surprised eBay purchased them as it would seem a much better fit for Yahoo or Google.

This acquisition actually worries me a bit, I dont really see the correlation between the two and am worried how eBay will run the site/system. Paypal sucks, eBay has gone downhill in my mind as I rarely buy things there anymore.

I just don’t see much improvement or innovation form eBay. If they are buying this as an ad buy, this sucks.

Yes, maybe stumbleupon can help ebay by letting ebay stumble all their auctions randomly throughout the stumbles at which point i might stop using it…. well, that’s the worst case but maybe they might leave it alone.

Congratulations to StumbleUpon - launched in 2002, took a small investment, and kicked some arse.

Mike, your forums are down.

I’m happy to hear this for the guys who do StumbleUpon - it’s a great product and one of the few web2.0 winners. I hope they don’t get caught in the “post-acquisition zombie state” that happens to so many start-ups after acquisition where no improvements happen anymore.

my SU username is http://ninetimessix.stumbleupon.com if anyone wants to add me.

Does anyone know how long as stumbleupon.com been around?

I also don’t like too much the idea of eBay acquiring StumbleUpon: the freedom of choice, publishing content and even social bookmarking quality may reduce and it will become one more of eBay’s marketing engines. Well, that’s just myself dreaming a little bit, but if eBay acquired StumbleUpon they want something in return. And they will surely get it.

Man Stumble upon is one of the best site. Everyone I know love it. 100, Million anytime. Ram Shriram - This guy is definitely Midas.

I like that StumbleUpon deals with spam sites very effectively. I have never seen an MFA site on the system and I bet that many are submitted. Kudos to the founders for the aquisition.

Tony - from what I recall I think they’ve been around since 2001. They were small, typical start-up in one of the founders basements. They moved from Canada(?) to SF about a 9mo-1yr ago…

I Love StumbleUpon. Based on what eBay paid for Skype, this deal can easily fetch north of $75

Go StumbleUpon!!

The UV number looks suspicious. They’ve basically been flat then all of a sudden a spike around the time they think of selling. Makes you wonder how much they are paying for that extra traffic and what ebay is really getting, other than swindled.

I really love stumble upon…it gives my blog some traffic every now and then.

You dont pay 65-70 mill to “leave something alone” if you cant integrate it - dont buy it

- Ebay will be the master ad - server through stumble upon.

- Ebay is a whore

lots of eBay dissing going on, anybody see their latest financial reports…..very strong!
http://www.businessweek.com/ap.....J7UBO1.htm

While Skype has yet to be logically integrated into eBay, it is still the killer VOIP app, and eBay sure is glad Goolge or Yahoo didn’t get it.

Interesting acquisition. Another example of big internet companies (namely eBay, Yahoo, and now Google) buying growing start-ups (JumpCut, FlickR, Delicious, Skype) with crappy revenue models. Good for the founders. StumbleUpon is actually cool, but I get the feeling with the barrier to entry being so low and the content belonging to users themselves, someone will come along with something cooler, flip it, and the end losers are the acquirers.

If I were an eBay shareholder, I’d have dumped all my shares the day they bought Skype. You can’t support everything with advertising. There isn’t enough advertising to go around in the world. What happens when everything that has a marginal cost goes to 0 and goes ad-supported? We spoil consumers, ruin real business, and destroy real innovation.

eBay has been looking for a social commerce solution.

StumbleUpon will be good for eBay in the Ad space and hopefully they will learn from their success in the social space and apply it to the their biggest social network…the eBay community.

Then hopefully we’ll see a social commerce experience evolve out of that combination.

Congrats to George Liang, he just left the Disruptive Innovations team (the same team I’m leaving) at eBay to join StumbleUpon as their Director of Product & User Experience in late 2006.

It pays to take some risk…StumbleUpon…Bix…TellMe all organizations seeded with eBay alumni that have been recently acquired by companies like Microsoft and Yahoo.

I’m not surprised, stubleupon is band on what Web2.0 is all about, but they added a tasty new flavour into the mix, good for them.

unless they merge accounts its ok for me. but ebay seemed too lazy earlier for such things.

eBay makes the dumbest acquisitions. PayPal made sense. But then there also Skype (huh?), and now this (wtf?). Neither of these fit into eBay’s service in any way, shape or form. Lame, lame, lame.

I disagree with Sean, I think Skype is extremely useful and will grow in the future. I think eBay is making strategic decisions that will aid them in the long. They may not fit into eBay’s service, but they all have a bright future in front of them.

Mike,

Would you mind moving your “Trackbacks/Pings” table BELOW your comments table? Annoying and useless to the average reader.

Well, ok.. IMO.

This is great for SU - it’s a great service and great social, vibrant community behind it. Good for them and good for eBay!

Its Good for Stumble upon to getting acquired. But question is what eBay is gong to do with SU.

http://www.suggestusability.com

Why ebay? interesting

I don’t understands eBay’s strategy… First the Skype purchase was badly explained (something to do with letting users talk to one another) and now this… Are they going to be randomly directing people to their product auction pages?

this tc article is the first time i have heard of StumbleUpon. I signed up and tried it out. Very cool. Within a couple of minutes, I was seeing cool sites of interest that I have been trying to Google for some time. Much better for my particular research area. I have been trying to get more familiar with digg, but still haven’t mastered that site yet.

I just wish I had known them earlier. Hopefully eBay does what Rod #19 states and improves the navigation engine of eBay, but at the same time leaves their core site alone.

Although I too wonder about the Skype acquisition, I am a loyal and enthusiastic Skyke user, though have never used Skype for any eBay/PayPal purpose…to date. Let’s hope Stumble Upon is left alone to Stumble along there already promising start.