The talks between EBay and StumbleUpon that were in progress for the last couple of weeks seem to be almost finished. The reported price on the StumbleUpon acquisition is $75 million. With 2.1 million registered users and 4 million websites stumbled daily, StumbleUpon might look good, but their monetization isn’t so easy to do. While they are selling stumbles for 5 cents, taking just $50 to bring 1000 somewhat targeted people on your website, they can’t exactly use this to make a huge profit. Most of their profits come from a toolbar that is used by the user to discover other websites. Furthermore, from my experience anyway, the stumblers are somewhat similar to those coming from digg.com. They come, they see, they like, they say I like it, then they leave for the next one. Its not as bad as Digg, but close enough.

One option for EBay would be to stumble users on their auctions. If a stumbler has selected that he wants to see auto and photography websites, bring them to auto and photo auctions. While it might sound good for EBay, I believe this would piss off many stumblers.

Time will tell if EBay bought StumbleUpon for the stumbling on auctions part, or just to expand in new areas.

Via TechCrunch

Tags: ebay, stumbleupon, digg, auctions