After spending $75 million in acquiring site recommendation engine StumbleUpon, eBay has plans at cutting off StumbleUpon from its armory. eBay has taken the assistance of Deutsche Bank to get a bid from the right buyer.
There aren’t any clues as to where the bid is going to start from but chances are that eBay might just fall short of selling it for the prize it had bought the recommendation engine. This could very well be for the stagnant trend over the last year in daily visits and page views; although the userbase has increased by 20% from 5 million last year to a little over million in less than six months.
I wonder what could be the reason for the current action eBay is taking and all that has to be done is to wait for the official announcement before we get a hint for the real reason behind all this. Readers have any ideas on this?
i don’t think they had a clue what to do with this awesome program. I use this program every day. hopefully the right company will pick it up and make it even better than it is.
[Reply]
StumbleUpon is stagnating as a result of their submission policies. If you write an informative article – well you can’t submit it yourself, and if your readers don’t (espcially if you have small readership), it will never appear in stumble. On the other hand, if you’re a spammer, you’ll just keep switching accounts so you can submit your own stuff. Result: StumbleUpon fills up with advert-ridden dross, and actually ends up filtering out honest people trying to promote decent blogs.
Stumble need to start filtering what gets submitted – some kind of reputation system perhaps?
[Reply]