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Techcrunch and GigaOm are reporting that eBay is about to close the acquisition of StumbleUpon, a very addictive social service that lets users discover websites based upon recommendations by people having similar interests. StumbleUpon has been in acquisition discussions since last November with Google, AOL and eBay and the price tag is rumored to be between $40 – $45 million range.

StumbleUpon lets users discover new sites and content around the world via a browser toolbar. All you have to do is to click on Stumble! and it will take you to a random page according to the preferences specified in your profile. After viewing the site you could rate it by by giving it a thumbs up or down. The more you will use stumble upon the better it will get to know about your likings. With this information about you StumbleUpon will begin to serve you highly relevant content that is rated positively by people with similar preferences. People who have once used this service have not seen back, even more so because of the surprise factor in what they might see next, and also because of delivering highly relevant and interesting content.

With the explosion of Web Video, StumbleUpon decided to take its revolutionary technology to the video frontiers and launched StumbleUpon for Video in mid Dec last year. David Feller, vice president of marketing at StumbleUpon commented on the release by saying

“We’ve seen a lot of growth in stumbling videos and now we’re able to bring you highly relevant, high quality content, based on your preferences. It’s very difficult to find something that is relevant to you just on searching ‘humor videos,’ or ‘cat videos.’ With StumbleVideo, you never leave the page. The content is brought directly to you. It’s a lot like channel searching but everything is customized based on your interests and preferences.�

In Feb 2007 StumbleUpon revamped their video site and included an interface specifically designed for the Wii’s Opera browser, enabling Wii owners to navigate through StumbleUpon videos, rate and comment them and discover the ones recommended by others having similar likings.

StumbleUpon also launched a click fraud proof advertising model, that received excellent reviews. StumbleUpon sends visitors directly to the website (or photo or video) instead of serving an ad and having visitors click through to reach your site. Once the visitor is on your site, he could either rate it positively or negatively, which in turn will send other non paid visitors to your site as well. Since StumbleUpon sends people who have already opted to view sites with a certain focus, this provides advertisers with visitors who were actually looking for sites like there’s. Advertisers could target their campaigns by category, location, and demographics. StumbleUpon charges 5 cents per targeted visitors for premium inclusion. Some people have used this to gain 2000+ feed subscribers in 12 days. StumbleUpon also recently went through a web2.0 makeover to show the latest and hottest news around the world, and just like they are a better Adsense, they have become a better Digg as well, since the system is immune to gaming.

StumbleUpon now has 2.1 million registered users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are “stumbled” daily. ComScore is reporting 6 million page views in March, doubling from the previous month. Unique visitors continue to rise sharply: 900,000 in March, 3x rise over last year.

I really think that Google missed out on a very lucrative startup, all the best to StumbleUpon team and eBay. StumbleUpon is another of Josh Kopelman’s winner picks, who invested $1.5 million in the company.

[Images Credit Techcrunch]