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Search - Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Prediction: eBay's StumbleUpon Pays For Itself In 12 Months

When eBay's purchase of StumbleUpon was leaked in April, many people wondered what on earth is eBay thinking. The world's largest auction site + a search toolbar have no business together.

In our view, Stumbleupon can be a very cost effective marketing vehicle. eBay could buy links from Google paying $2 here and $3 there and see it add up to $75M, or it could launch more TV commercials to build its brand. But for a global company that gets to $75M real quick to. Far better to sit on the desktops of 2.3M net heads, with a 150% annual growth rate.

With this, we feel confident that eBay will earn back its $75M check in kind within a year. Alright, its a bit of a bogus prediction as we won't know what eBay might have spent in marketing if it didn't have free Stumbelupon traffic, but we're sticking with it.

Gigaom's hypothesis is a bit more grand. They suspect that eBay will integrate Stumbleupon with Skype to create a search and communication package that will provide a strategic bullwork against Google. That implement may well happen, but our impression of eBay is that they are dollars and sense people who for better or worse don't put corporate strategy first.

Plus, as Mashable is reporting, eBay is going to goose Stumbleupon's subscriber base by sending its own traffic that way.

eBay driving users to Stumbleupon