In May 2007, eBay bought Stumble Upon (the popular website recommendation engine) for $75 million. The acquisition seemed quite formidable at the time. StumbleUpon membership has jumped from 5,000,000 to 6,003,763 since April – a 20% increase in only five months.
So why is eBay putting StumbleUpon on the market? That July, the site had 4.4 million visitors and 31 million page views! But only 12 months later, the visitor count had dropped to 1.3 million visitors and only 25 million page views. Perhaps eBay sees no recovery in sight with the onslaught of Digg, Buzz and Twitter, and is trying to cut losses.
StumbleUpon is a site similar to these in that it uses positive and negative user ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. Users can see stumbles that friends and stumblers with similar interests have flagged, and the social engine rakes in 10 million stumbles a day.
However, it never was able to catch up with Digg in terms of popularity, and with Yahoo’s simple to use Buzz taking a bite out of the market and speedsters using twitter, this is perhaps a slow death for the San Francisco based company.
Tags: Buzz, Digg, Ebay, StumbleUpon