Web auction leader eBay Inc. has acquired Web surfing recommendation site StumbleUpon for $75 million in cash, matching the highest value reported as under discussion weeks ago.
StumbleUpon Inc. is an online review site that recommends Web pages within sites such as Flickr, MySpace or YouTube, based on “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” votes from other Web users with shared interests. It counts 2.3 million users and is growing at 150 percent a year.
The service helps people find Web sites, videos, products, people and other online information according to their tastes.
Community members add more than 5 million recommendations per day, meaning StumbleUpon’s depth improves the more often it is used.
StumbleUpon combines peer recommendations with search features and as such presents an alternative to Web search leader Google.
So why would eBay want to acquire StubleUpon?
My take is they plan to use the recommendation features built into the StubleUpon service as a referral system for eBay users to locate Web auctions that interest them.
Thoughts?
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ebay are moving out of the market niche and want to own more successful websites, and be in the race with MS yahoo and google.
Don’t forget they own paypal, which started as a service for ebay users, but it’s much much much more now.
Yes eBay owns PayPal now but in the beginning they didn’t. It was a stand alone company.
2007 seems to be the year for large corporations like eBay, Google, Yahoo, etc to buy up smaller geektastic companies.