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May 30, 2007

eBay’s StumbleUpon Acquisition: Confirmed at $75 Million

Nick Gonzalez

49 comments »

As we expected earlier today, eBay has confirmed an all cash $75 million acquisition of social discovery service StumbleUpon. eBay says StumbleUpon fits will with their “goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust” and helps them learn more about newly emerging community based businesses.

Although you can imagine “StumbleUpon Shopping” coming soon, eBay is leaving the company alone and taking a wait-and-see approach. The corporation will remain completely intact, except for the addition of eBay’s Michael Buhr, who will serve as general manager for the product.

Throughout 2007, StumbleUpon has seen tremendous growth. They currently have over 2.3 million registered users, serve 5 million daily recommendations, and are experiencing a 150% year over year growth rate. Here’s a quick look at their latest stats from comScore:

suuniques.png

More crunch: click here for the StumbleUpon fact sheet.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Steve S

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    It’s like television, but online and only involving products…from eBay.

    Hopefully this doesn’t diminish the core that StumbleUpon based its popularity on, being able to find really “neat stuff” without having to know what you’re looking for.

    75 Million Dollars isn’t too bad of a price, either.

  2. myspace

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    75 million, about $32.61 to acquire each user. Where’s my check?

  3. Mike Street

    May 30th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    Wow everything is getting brought up. Hell someone buy my site for $500K that’s cheap!

  4. Jay (living in First Life)

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    At some point, all the users of these communities need to band together to demand a stake in the businesses they are helping get sold at insane valuations. Sad to say that Agloco has tried this and is more of a pyramid marketing scheme than anything else.

  5. Patrix

    May 30th, 2007 at 3:49 pm

    How long before there are only a handful of companies on the net?

  6. Jeremy

    May 30th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

    >>>all the users of these communities need to band together to demand a stake in the businesses

    Interesting idea, but I don’t think it’ll work. Not everybody participates in a community for money. We have 500K monthly uniques & a revenue sharing program that’s unique in our category…but, it doesn’t drive as many participants as “need”. Fulfill a need, and you’ll get user participation in spades.

  7. Andy

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    Bubble 2.0 is fully upon us. Look for the growing deadpool in about 6 months to a year.

  8. David Millsaps

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    Although some of the other recent big buy ups smell of Bubble 2.0 - this is an aquasition I can stand behind. Stumble has an incredibly loyal user base, one that is connected through common interests in a much tighter mesh than you see in other social apps. It is also creating a qualitative database that could be used to create incredibly refined results that were much more resistant to gaming than purely algorithmic ones. Calacanis’ primary competitor to Mahalo is SU.

  9. heptaro

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

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  10. Clickfire

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    I hope. Would be said to see a neat tool like SU become over commercialized.

  11. Tim Norton

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:22 pm

    Its interesting nowadays just how much traffic you get to your site from stumbleupon.

    While our converstion rate to signups/paying customers isn’t that high from stumbleupon visitors, it certainly pushes through a lot of traffic, and we haven’t done a single thing to get put on stumble upon, so they’re a pretty remarkable and low cost lead source, probably played its part in what is a significant but probably very fair valuation.

  12. extensions forklift

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:27 pm

    I guess “it” was Stumble Upon?

  13. Mark Rosner

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:32 pm

    Personally, I didn’t find this service very useful. More of a time waster, imho.

    http://www.capitalai.com/blog/.....-the-buzz/

  14. William Ryall

    May 30th, 2007 at 9:52 pm

    Stumble upon is one of my favourite toolbar add-ons. Sure it’s a time waster, it’s also invaluable for niche blogging research. In fact, I use it more often than google now when I am looking for something on a specific category. (It brings back more unique results).

    It’s a really smart buy for eBay as well. If you could stumble upon new interesting auctions, you are going to drive up the number of bids and the average prices on the auctions. (Which will lead to a bigger user base and more auctions). I know when I first started using eBay I was obessed with it, people like finding odd things and they like ‘winning’.

    Nice one eBay, best buy of the year.

  15. Velioncho

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:32 pm

    It is a mismatch. StumbleUpon is a generic solution.You want to stumble upon on an auction. Come on…

  16. Phil

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:41 am

    I tried StumbleUpon a while back because it was simply too good as a time waster. It learnt what I liked pretty quickly and returned loads of awesome sites - If you’re bored then this will entertain you for as long as required.
    I had to remove it before I got addicted, the algorithm is great and the sites returned were very relevant.
    If the rating / ranking / tagging information from StumbleUpone were integrated into a search engine I expect it would be very useful - Google should have bought it just for that.

  17. Paypal2u Blogger

    May 31st, 2007 at 2:01 am

    After all this while, however only now EBay stumble upon this good sites. I wonder why it takes this long to stumble upon it.

    Anyway, with that kind of money, SU will add more services to their ready customer after all. Hola to SU.

  18. powerleveling

    May 31st, 2007 at 2:57 am

    why does he always sleep

  19. Pierre Foucart

    May 31st, 2007 at 6:05 am

    “The corporation will remain completely intact, except for the addition of eBay’s Michael Buhr, who will serve as general manager for the product.” If they change the head of product… It won’t remain intact.

  20. Ryan Pratt

    May 31st, 2007 at 11:42 am

    Hope they buy http://www.ListAfterList.com too!

  21. Cash The Checkw

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:43 pm

    I really hope eBay doesn’t ruin StumbleUpon..

  22. Ivan

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:50 pm

    Phil: I find SU to be quite opposite. It seems to have learned nothing about me. The quality of suggestions is not improving at all. And I vote for almost every page I visit (hundreds so far).

  23. Nueva York

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:55 pm

    Also Google has bought Panoramio for google Earth

  24. Neil J. Squillante

    May 31st, 2007 at 1:15 pm

    “The corporation will remain completely intact, except for the addition of eBay’s Michael Buhr, who will serve as general manager for the product.”

    That’s like saying the Titanic would have completed its journey except for a pesky iceberg. Putting a GM from the acquiring company in place is equivalent to a CEO change.

  25. daniel rueda

    May 31st, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    Stumbleupon.com is a terrible domain name. They would be better off changing the name and utilizing the social software apps. When you stumble upon something means “finding” by “accident”. Mylocator.com has been perfecting a “finding” strategy for 8 years now. The Founder is the pioneer of vertical locator cluster technology. All these major companies need a true network that is vertical, location based, keyphrase; a family of strategic vertical locator properties. MyLocator is that platform with over 1000 vertical locator channels. Entertainment can be Ebays next thing if they acquire or create entertaining “FindingEngines”. Right now natural results are over(circa 1999, google, yahoo, ask, all of them), premium location is everything. 65 million domains and only about 30-50 thousand are any good. (Commonsense, top level, keyphrase, strategic, location based, vertical channels) Search is Dead, Premium Vertical Location is everything. Commonsense Vertical Location + Social Networking= word of mouth advertisng(the most valuable on the planet). Just waiting for meg to claim stumbleupon is a verb. Skype was sooooo popular. And i would guess less than 5 percent of the us population knows what it means.

  26. Kyle

    May 31st, 2007 at 10:42 pm

    I think it was a good move on ebays part…they were buying market share for a reasonable price!

  27. Phil

    June 1st, 2007 at 1:59 am

    Ivan: Maybe I was just lucky then, however all your votes will be stored and even if StumbleUpon isn’t interpreting them well they would still be useful in helping rank pages in a search engine.

  28. Rachel

    June 2nd, 2007 at 5:25 am

    I’m really not sure how this acquisition is gonna help eBay. I’m a happy user of StumbleUpon but I have no interest in eBay. Well, then again, maybe I’m in the minority.

    But still..

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