It looks like Skype is not the only bad acquisition for e-commerce giant eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) lately, as TechCrunch is now reporting that eBay is looking to dump another recent acquisition, StumbleUpon.com. According to TechCrunch, eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to help the company unload StumbleUpon, a website recommendation service that it acquired a little over a year ago, back in May 2007.
At the time that eBay purchased StumbleUpon, it paid $75 million for the company, and it is pretty doubtful that it is going to be able to sell it for that amount, probably far less due to the inability to grow its popularity over the past 16 months.
Over the past year the company has been unable to build on the StumbleUpon name and increase user visits to the site. A year ago the site was getting, according to Comscore, 4.4 million visitors and 31 million page views a month. As recently as July those figures were down to 1.3 million visitors with 25 million page views.
While I personally have never used StumbleUpon, it is definitely a name that I am familiar with, and have heard many times, so I decided to at least go check out the alexa ranking and see just how the website has been able to do traffic-wise. Granted, I realize alexa rankings are not the absolute perfect way to monitor a sites actual traffic, but it does give us a decent snapshot of just how well, or in this case badly, the site has been at increasing its web presence:
Good luck eBay with the sale. With all the negative publicity the company is getting over its failed endeavors with Skype, I am sure that it would have loved to have StumbleUpon work out for it, but it just doesn't seem like that is going to happen.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer.
Closing Bell: When We All Love the PIIGS (NBG, SQNM, PG, ERTS, KO)
Serious Money: Cheapest Stocks List Shrinks from 26 to 21
Chasing Value: Hasbro Earnings Makes My Point
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-19-2008 @ 3:04PM
Mozelle said...
Here we go again with another stupid blunder by eBay! Skype was already stupid enough. When will those idiots learn? Why don't they make eBay a friendlier site for everyone using their site ? How about customer support? They need to re-vamp their original site and make it user friendly. eBay is out to destroy themselves if they have not done so already!