eBay Sales Off StumbleUpon Is Skype Next?

eBay has sold StumbleUpon back to the original co-founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith along with several investors making the company independent again after nearly two years. The details of the purchase weren't disclosed so we don't know how much of original $75 million that eBay paid for the purchase of the site in 2007 the company got back.

Since taking over StunbleUpon eBay has watched the site grow from 2.3 million to more than 7.4 million members, and from about 150 million recommendations per month to 425 million. In the same period, the number of advertisers grew from a few hundred to about 20,000. But eBay never really assimilated StumbleUpon into its overall business model.

"It was a pretty lucrative offer, because nothing really changed," co-founder Garrett Camp said. "The startup remained at its offices in downtown San Francisco, where it still operates, and got a valuable infusion of capital. But ultimately, eBay couldn't find a way to integrate StumbleUpon into the larger business", he said.

"As eBay Inc. expands its leadership in online payments and e-commerce, it has become apparent that there are few long-term, strategic synergies between StumbleUpon and the eBay Inc. portfolio," eBay said on its official eBay INK blog.

It appears as though eBay might be cutting some of the fat and some of their more questionable acquisitions. Rumors have surfaced over the past few weeks that Skype's founders have been looking to travel down the same path the StumbleUpon founders did.

According to reports from both Reuters and the New York Times Skype's Co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have contacted several private equity firms in order to make a bid for the company. eBay bought Skype back in 2005 for $2.6 billion however sources from the Times estimated the new deal to be worth slightly less at just over $2 billion.

Yesterday the WSJ Blog Deal Journal reported eBay was encouraging them to make an offer, however it appears their original offer fell short. According to the post the proposal involved private-equity firms contributing some $1 billion to the deal and eBay providing financing for the rest of the capital.

The founders’ offer fell on deaf ears, as it was well below the price at which Ebay was willing to sell the business. The two sides are far apart and at this stage a deal involving the private-equity firms is unlikely to be completed, said people familiar with the matter.

Skype has largely been a disappointment since it was acquired by eBay. The company took a $1.4 billion write down against the company last year. However this year the company has turned things around. Becoming the world's largest provider of long distance communications while posting $550 million in revenue.

Neither eBay or Skype's co-founders have come forth with comments regarding the deal and most sources have said at this time it seems unlikely a deal will happen. eBay is reportedly looking for more than they pair are willing to offer at this time.

Update 4/14 - 2:00PM
In a strange twist to the story eBay today announced plans for a 2010 IPO of Skype, spinning the company off on its own. For more details see our latest post "eBay Plans To Spin Off Skype, IPO Planned For 2010"

eBay Selling Stumbleupon For $75million

According to TechCrunch eBay has enlisted the services of Deutsche Bank to unload Stumbleupon, asking price a cool $75 million.

eBay acquired Stumbleupon a little over a year ago at the price tag of $75 million so it looks as though the are just trying to get their money back. However recent reports have showed that Stumbleupon's traffic has stagnated. StumbleUpon says usage is growing at a fast clip, despite website traffic, because most users never visit the site after downloading the toolbar.

In an attempt at driving more traffic Stumbleupon has moved away from their traditional toolbar that users must download to "Stumble" onto user-recommended content. Instead opting for a web-based browser toolbar which allows users to use Stumbleupon without registering or installing a toolbar in your browser. Just visit StumbleUpon's new homepage stumble a page and the toolbar will show as a small frame above pages.



Additionally StumbleUpon is introducing a partner program for sites that will take advantage of the web toolbar. Partner sites like National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The Huffington Post can integrate a StumbleUpon toolbar into their site that "stumbles" content from within the site. The new program will increase page views on partner sites by introducing users to new content, while helping StumbleUpon reach a broader audience increasing the amount of people looking at their ad content.

StumbleUpon’s 2008 revenues are estimated to be $6 million or so with an incredibly high advertising satisfaction rates. For every 20 or 30 Web pages users see when they click the "stumble" button they are served one paid result. Approximately 75 percent of its paid results have a positive rating, compared to an overall favorability rating of 85 percent for its non-paid content.

WriteSomething - Endless Senseless Collaborative Book

It just so happens I Stumbledupon this site one night on accident. I meant to click a bookmark on my toolbar instead hitting the Stumbleupon button. I was dropped onto a page of tangled sentences, words and phrases that I thought had no relative meaning, I mean after all a black and white page with a bunch of random sentences doesn't and all to often misspelled words doesn't mean much.

While its true taken at face value they really have little meaning once you look at the whole you you gain a greater understanding of what you are viewing. Randoms thoughts of random people from around the world. If this doesn't offer an interesting insight nothing can.

About the site:

The authors (creators to be more exact) created WriteSomething the "Endless senseless interactive book", as a project with a plan to create the longest web page in the world. Then take those pages created entirely of random mussing of passeries and create a printed book

"This is an experiment. Our aim is to make a book that will be created by spontaneous and unlimited creativity of our visitors. The book will have thousands of authors..."

The site was created January 2007 by founders Tamara Razov and Anton Petrovic, also founding members of a well-known online museum of discarded photographs, Skarabej.com.

The web page allows visitors to enter text which is immediately published without validation. Visitors do not have to think about meaning, correctness or quantity of written text. Simply type whatever comes to mind and publish it.

The project follows the automatic writing technique, where the process of writing is meant to happen very fast, without thought, so the writers themselves aren't sure what will be put on paper (or in this case, web page). The final result is a long string of sentences which are, one by one, creating the finished work. In this case the work is done by the visitor, all at random all anonymous.

Currently the page boasts some pretty impressive statistics. These statistics are updated every hour so they won't be exact. Here is a link to view the realtime stats.

• Total number of posts: 414,126
  • Posts in Croatian language: 343,081> (82.8 %)
  • Posts in English and other languages: 71,045 (17.2 %)
• Total number of deleted (SPAM and inappropriate) posts: 47,795
• An average post has 64 characters
• Overall text size: 55.8MB
• Most posts, 6463 were published on Dec 19, 2007
• On Mar 1, 2008 there was a recorded maximum of 4609 users online
• Average posts per day: 651
• Top 10 countries by posts count
  1. Croatia; 338,604 posts
  2. United States; 44,267 posts
  3. Bosnia and Herzegovina; 27,337 posts
  4. Unknown country; 7,657 posts
  5. United Kingdom; 6,962 posts
  6. India; 4,474 posts
  7. Canada; 4,193 posts
  8. Germany; 3,448 posts
  9. Serbia; 3,006 posts
  10. Slovenia; 2,000 posts

Personally I think its an interesting project. An old English teacher of mine use to make us site and do automatic witting projects and I always thought it was interesting to actually see where my own thoughts headed. This brings it to a larger scale and opens then door to show you what others are thinking.