eBay Plans to Sell StumbleUpon

eBay is planning to sell StumbleUpon, the website recommendation engine. It paid $75 million last year for StumbleUpon but critics questioned the acquisition because the site wasn't related to its auction service.

StumbleUpon is a great tool to find websites that you like. It has a toolbar and user-friendly tools to find new sites related to your topic of interest. Suppose you are interested in philosophy. StumbleUpon helps you find great sites in that area. It also has a voting system, where users can vote the site up or down, and based on the cumulative voting, the most popular sites will show up when you hit the StumbleUpon button. In May 2007, eBay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million and many questioned why eBay bought it since the site wasn’t related to its main auction site. eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to find the right buyer and price, according to a source close to TechCrunch. eBay will be find it very difficult to sell it for the price they paid, according to Arrington from TechCrunch. And the current economy is not conducive for a high asking price. According to ComScore statistics, StumbleUpon has seen a decline in worldwide visitors (1.3 million in 2008 from 4.4 million in 2007) and in page views (25 million page views in 2008 compared to 31 million page views in 2007). The only luck they had so far is the number of registered users, which is going up steadily. It has 6 million users as of today. As far as eBay is concerned, it was a bad move; not every StumbleUpon visitor were interested to visit eBay, and most likely they drifted away from it towards the sites and areas they liked most. I don’t think Google, Microsoft, Apple will be interested in purchasing StumbleUpon but most likely it may end up with AOL and other small companies.