Saturday 20 September 2008

Stumble Upon for sale by Ebay!


Rumours suggest that eBay is selling Stumble Upon due to falling number of Stumblers and due to inability to make it inot a cash cow!

In May 2007 eBay acquired website recommendation engine StumbleUpon for $75 million!

In July StumbleUpon had 1.3 million worldwide visitors and 25 million page views. Twelve months earlier the service attracted 4.4 million visitors and 31 million page views.

StumbleUpon is a website and content discovery service enabled via a browser toolbar. StumbleUpon uses positive and negative user ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality

Registered users have continued to rise steadily, however. The service had 5 million in April 2008. As of this evening, the site shows 6,003,763, a 20% rise in less than 5 months.

It is doubtful that ebay will be able to get $75 Million off it.

According to informed sources, eBay bought SU because they saw they were being edged out of the online properties market, and they thought that maybe eBay sales could be stumbled through SU, or perhaps the codebase and idea behind SU could be applied to finding sales on eBay. Both good ideas, both far more complicated to implement than eBay realised at the time - but it was a desperation buy. At the time it made sense. Since then Yahoo has collapsed, Facebook and MySpace have plateaued and Google has consolidated some of their holdings, leading to a very different market.

Let's see who will bid for Stumble Upon and what will the next few months bring upon us!

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