Friday, June 1, 2007

EBay Acquires StumbleUpon

The StumbleUpon browser bar to discover new semi-random sites (the Google Toolbar these days has a somewhat similar feature).

EBay snatched up social website discovery/ bookmarking engine StumbleUpon for a reported ~$75 million (this sound like peanuts considering some of the recent acquisitions by other tech companies such as Microsoft and Google). StumbleUpon must have an immense user base, judging from the referrer traffic it sends to sites*.

It’s unclear to me how this belongs with the eBay product range. Ebay says it’s a fit because of their goal of “pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust.” Huh? StumbleUpon is a community based on commerce? Another case of unrelated land grab, I guess. 2007 might go down into web history books as the big phase of net player consolidation.

Ongoing comments

*StumbleUpon has about 23 million according to eBay’s press release, but many of those might have been one-time users who deserted the service by now. This number might be as useful or useless as a highway traffic report for tomorrow that’s based on an estimation of all cars that ever passed through that highway in the past.

[Thanks Colin Colehour!]

EBay Acquires StumbleUpon by Philipp Lenssen

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