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Sep 19 2008
What You Don’t Know About StumbleUpon…
eBay divorcing StumbleUpon.
The social discovery and recommendation search service StumbleUpon – you know, the one you are so happy to use to drive traffic to your site – belongs to eBay.
Yes, the deal was closed in May 2007, when eBay paid $75 million for a service that back then only had 2.3 million registered users. Today StumbleUpon has over 6 million users – an extraordinary growth.
Last year in May there were predictions of a “StumbleUpon Shopping” service to be integrated in SU’s platform, but these predictions never came to fruition. eBay has probably understood that the success of a social discovery engine depends on a clean platform where advertising is unobtrusive.
Apparently owning a successful startup that doesn’t bring direct traffic to eBay.com (and its localized sites) is not profitable. TechCrunch reports that eBay is trying to sell off SU are at least distressing if we are to consider the potential buyers Microsoft and Google. You can safely assume that SU will change under new owners. Right now SU’s monetization model is based on a very unobtrusive advertising model that enables advertisers to target visitors based on their personal interests, location, history of rating similar sites, etc:
There is no ad impression or click-through. Rather than using intrusive forms of advertising (like popup ads), we display your entire page. Your page will be the only content displayed in the user’s web-browser. Your site isn’t wrapped inside a frame or presented as an ad within another page. You have the visitor’s full attention.
The system works better than a Google AdWords campaign – naturally providing that the content displayed on the page you try to advertise is valuable, entertaining, original… etc. SU users are a very interesting crowd – they cannot be manipulated with blatant sales pitches and aggressive advertising.
Now that we know that eBay is looking to sell, some questions arise:
Who will buy StumbleUpon and how will this deal affect the SU community? What are your thoughts?
I would hate to see StumbleUpon sold off, especially since eBay hasn’t tampered with the model all that much, particularly by serving us ads touting the worst of what eBay has to offer us.
If Google or Microsoft were to buy SU, I’d imagine that the site would be monetized to death, with clickable ads running along the side of each page, perhaps overruling our own pages with ads on them.
I can’t imagine eBay profiting off of the sale of SU, given the current market conditions. Then again, that hasn’t stopped Google and others from overpaying for other web businesses in the past and it won’t in the future.
Matt Keegan | Sep 19, 2008 | Reply
I am afraid of the same thing, Matt. If Google buys they’ll intoxicate us with adsense type of ads, lowering user experience on SU.
The question is: who else has the financial power and the marketing intelligence to invest in SU?
mig | Sep 19, 2008 | Reply
good post, thanks for this!
RPO | Sep 19, 2008 | Reply
i’m sure there’ll be ad anywhere with the new owner
Melv | Sep 19, 2008 | Reply
I found it hilarious how it says “eBay has probably understood that the success of a social discovery engine depends on a clean platform where advertising is unobtrusive” and then smack dab right under that is an ad. But seriously, I like to think of myself as a moderate StumbleUpon user, and I’d hate to see ads all over the place. I love the way it is now. Hopefully, someone smart will by it and will leave it the way it is. If not, a similar SU site will be bound to pop up, as they always do. I’d still much prefer SU! Thanks for alerting me to this!
Mr. Chandler the Internet Legend | Sep 19, 2008 | Reply
lol. i stumbled this……….. im kinda ROFLing.
Dante | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
Now I know Ebay owns SU.
Charles | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
change is inevitable
stringsmith | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I don’t know if the service will remain the same if Ebay sells it to another company, say Google. The moment I hear it’s acquired by Google I will uninstall it for good. That’s just me.
koncept | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I dunno, I hope google buys it, I’ve got faith in them. They’re not dumb. They will know forcing advertising on us would discourage SU users. In fact I wouldn’t put it past google to improve stumbleupon.
Ben | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
given that SU does not cost anything to use, and is more valuable for entertainment, research, or passing time than say something like television, if they were to send you sponsored websites and ads, it would be better than losing it altogether. being a sponsor you can opt out of SU sponsored stumbles, cost $10 – $20, and if your not willing to pay it, forget the whole “i ought to be getting something for free crap” when its something as valuable as StumbleUpon.
dreamslikedisney | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I strongly disagree. Given some unintrusive adsense like service, I am likely to greatly benefit from ads tailored to my needs. I doubt they’ll half your screen for the use of ads… maybe only in the comments page?
Itamar | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I can see that E-Bay would want to divest StumbleUpon. It doesn’t fit in with their core business. And I respect them for not changing SU to align it with their business.
My hope is that the eventual buyer doesn’t screw up a good thing in an effort to make it like some other social media site.
Chris Cree | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
@Mr. Chandler – well, yeah… that was the point: an ad “right in your face” that proves how annoying aggressive advertising might be. The only difference is that the ad advertises one of our services and not our competitors or something random.
I’d hate to see the same practice at SU – and I am sure the new owners will make a few changes that will annoy the users.
mig | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I really hope SU does not change, it is one of my favorite things. It is better then digg, delicious, and all the other things of this type.
john | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
Interesting……I never knew ebay owned stumbleupon. It is kind of funny that I stumbled to get to this site, kind of ironic.
Craig "Craigerson" Petersen | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
Ah, but if StumbleUpon’s model worked, they’d be making money for eBay, and eBay wouldn’t need to sell it. So something different has to be done in order to monetize SU. Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Even if Ebay kept it, ads would have to be added to the service.
Services that don’t generate income eventually go away (Twitter notwithstanding. They still have a fresh influx of Venture Capital). StumbleUpon has a few choices: a) Start charging everyone that uses it for the service (which won’t happen. Nobody pays for services on the internet) b) Put ads in the pages it delivers (and risk violating the integrity of pages, and possibly open themselves up to litigation from page owners) c) Put ads in the stumble bar or a separate frame at the top of the page d) go out of business entirely.
dogboi | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I don’t see why any company would tinker with the current workings of SU, which hauls in millions. Who needs ads when you are sending millions of users a day right to your companies page?
Dwindle | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
The day SU starts ad-spamming me is the day it gets uninstalled. It can only survive in it’s current (free) form, who cares if someone’s making money from it or not – I don’t.
Eoghan | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
I stumbleuponned this and it made my day lol
Anonwhymouse | Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
Wow this is very interesting. I hope stumbleupon doesn’t change its format if sold to another company. I enjoy the clean delivery of websites without ads all over the place.
Reptile Pets | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
If the ads are specifically geared toward me then I won’t mind so much…but I dont want to see ads for make-up and stuff all over my internet.
I like the idea of a seperate bar on top of the screen specifically for SU ads kind of like the screens that wrap around arenas and stadiums. Those don’t distract form the sport (or webpage) if they are kept seperate.
Bukator | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
I’m not too worried about it. SU did an amazing job of making the internet fun again. If SU gets monetized to death who cares, they created something amazing for the world. If the new owners ruin it, the someone from the old user base will have an opportunity to take SU’s place. Stumbling across the IDEA for SU was the breakthrough. It’s simple technology, and creating an open source or competitor product would be relatively simple. Anyways, long story short. Not worried. If you are technically capable of making a new version of SU, let me know, I’d love to design it
xo
Rahul Panchal | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
Didn’t know that eBay owned SU – or that it’s about to formerly own it. But given that eBay is about to shoot itself in the foot with a howitzer October 1, it doesn’t surprise me that they didn’t know what to do/couldn’t make any money with SU. Of the two choices given, there is no choice. The Evil Empire……or choice number two, Google in this case. And given Google’s history of investment in alternative energy and societal good (even given the B & M Gates Foundation)I’ll still side with Google.
Slarty Bartfast | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
Ah, but if StumbleUpon’s model worked, they’d be making money for eBay, and eBay wouldn’t need to sell it. So something different has to be done in order to monetize SU. Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Even if Ebay kept it, ads would have to be added to the service.
Not necessarily, it may be that Google could take the same business model and make it profitable (or at least neutral) while eBay lost money.
The big key is that Google has such a huge market penetration to advertise SU, and already has massive advertising relationships all over. Imagine if Google contacted every business they deal with for ads and said “hey, we have this great Stumble Upon tool we just bought…right now it has “x users” but we haven’t advertised it yet. We’re going to be pushing it to every user of Chrome, Gmail, etc. How much would you pay to have your site come up every so many clicks in the relevant category?
Many of the categories currently don’t seem to have much ad penetration, probably because they haven’t been able to sell them. If you choose something like architecture you’ll see constant pages that are probably ads, but if you choose something like animals it seems like you see few (at least, that’s my impression…maybe the paid pages are just less obvious).
Me | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
They should just make it open source, I am sure there are other programmers amongst us that would be willing to donate their time and effort to improving it, the only problem would be paying for so much bandwidth. Also I question the legality of putting ads on someone else’s site, on such a large scale there are bond to be lawsuits. If it is illegal then I welcome google, any company that runs Linux is a company I trust. (and AdBlock+ gets rid of all those nasty ad sense ads).
Anonymous | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
EBay hasn’t been happy with stumbleupon because when they first bought it they tried sneaking in ebay adds and promptly got thumbed down, not only the add but every other ebay site. Google or M$ would suck as they are already a too privacy invasive. How about one of the other players, like Time Warner, Disney or NYT. What stumble does provide is rock solid information upon what people from each demographic like in a website or content, so for portals managing many web sites it provide valuable data as well as a steady stream of add revenue.
Robert | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
Gentle People:
Excuse me but who in hell invited corporate advertising to join us on the World Wide Web?
The Web was not created for business advertising! It was first created for better communication between Government departments as for example: Universities, Hospitals, Banks, Police and Fire departments as well as Social services.
Later it was usurped by creative individuals on DOS programmed personal P.C.’s who used it without the knowledge of the telephone companies. A few years later, two young characters by the name of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs introduced a small file organizing program called Windows and the World Wide Web was born. Today, the W.W.W. is changing the world for the better because it unites and educates people around the world. It is a relatively free mass communications Media standing apart from Government and Corporate controlled Television.
Of course the Corporate world wants the same kind of domination it exerts on Television; but it won’t get it! We stand blatantly in their faces! Millions of old Geeks who continue to monitor the Web and who can do plenty of harm to companies who consider themselves all powerful. In the past we have allowed limited polite Corporate advertising but we do not hesitate to swat Spam when it encroaches into our Email boxes. Co-Existence is the key word. When advertising becomes pushy and obnoxious millions of us politely ask it to leave the Web…or else!
When advertising becomes obtrusive I and millions of my friends take great pleasure in swatting the hell out of it!
signed: Joseph Raglione.
Executive director: The World Humanitarian Peace and Ecology Movement.
Joseph Raglione | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
I almost hope that Yahoo! buys it, but knowing Yahoo! they don’t have enough excessive cash to take it. I mean look at Delicious or Flickr, it looks excellent now, for the people who do still use it, and Yahoo! made very minor changes. Google I feel change this too much. As for Microsoft, I doubt they’re even interested.
Blake | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
Haha, me too, Dante.
It would so suck is SU was changed.
I’ve learned more in the past three days of stumbling than I have in three years of just googling random shit.
I hope they don’t change anything.
But even if they did, I’d probably still use it.
What would be really bad is if they got rid of it all toghether.
Monika | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
75m for a toolbar that effectively doesn’t make any money? Seems like a case of too much cash and not enough brains.
Ryan G | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
Wow! It will take me two days to answer all these comments!
Thanks everyone! You all make valid points. It’s really interesting to see how the faithful SU users react to the possibility that their favorite platform changes. Someone at SU (in the comments) even suggested that fear of being bought by Google is narrow minded. I don’t think people “fear” Google. I just think that “enough is enough!” – someone else should get a piece of the pie.
About Microsoft “not being interested” – hm… I think they should be. Search is going social – if they invested in Powerset, combining that technology with SU will bring them one step closer to the next big search engine they are trying to build. Of course, the acquisition will not make for a “Google killer”, but it would certainly bring some market advantage. In my opinion SU has the potential of becoming the most powerful social network of the moment, it can even surpass digg – I am not talking in terms of “traffic” brought to your pages, but in terms of users and usability. It’s far more fun to use, it makes human interaction more genuine and the list of pros could go on and on.
And Ryan G, you are wrong if you assume that the SU toolbar doesn’t make any money!!! More than half of the sites brought to your browser by SU when you click on the Stumble! button on that toolbar are paid advertising. I already mentioned that the SU advertising model is unobtrusive. The only problem with it is that it is not transparent either. No one can make the difference between the sites that paid to be featured or the sites that genuinely earned their place.
mig | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
stumbled! lol
Rick | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
An ad? You too? I just blocked it after I saw it XD I do concur though I like ebays methods. Also if they do sell I would prefer it to be to someone who values privacy, like the guys at cuil.(They do still value that right?)
Anonomyus | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
Sell it to google, they won’t want to sell us stuff, they will just want to know what we like for future references. lol
Tj | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
If it was changed in anyway, I wonld delete all of it! No question about it.
Chuck O'Neal | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
very interesting post. thank you! it certainly made this stumbler more educated.
nanna | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
If Google were to buy SU, they wouldn’t need to insert ads. Google’s ads appear on such a large number of pages that the ads will see increased clicks just by virtue of people stumbling to the pages that have them.
Matt | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
The real question is how long did you honestly think I would tolerate those annoying banner ads in the middle of the story?
Adblock: *.amazonaws.com/adspot/*
hoq | Sep 21, 2008 | Reply
I don’t care. Just let me keep my original user view.
Fastercat | Sep 22, 2008 | Reply
The stumbleupon ad model works if you have a great site that needs an audience. Sometimes it can be random visitors but it is certainly worth it if the advertisers are aiming for internet users that like to see and engage in new things.
Sleep | Sep 22, 2008 | Reply
Stumbleupon is over anyway. Five years ago it was SO COOL … every page you stumbled was a winner. It is now just full of over enthusiastic noobs who Discover/Stumble every page they come across. Its pathetic. Pages of sparkling unicorns, dull tired old content and spam. I dont know anyone who is internet savvy that rates it or uses it anymore. Its had its day. Its just so over. It got ruined by noobs.
Bev | Sep 22, 2008 | Reply
The day that the ads are more than 10 percent of SU I(and many others )will unload SU. Hooray for the USA where money is the most important thing!!!!
pete peterson | Sep 23, 2008 | Reply
change is the only constant
bm | Sep 23, 2008 | Reply
I Stumbled this, too. It seemed like a good thing to do. I never figured out how to use Stumble other than to use the toolbar. LOL. You might say I never got my footing on stumble.
Rocque | Sep 23, 2008 | Reply
They cannot just stick ads on other people’s websites: copyright violations. They’d have to do something else to have my websites be part of the database, like get my permission.
So it’s as it is…no ads run on the websites.
I wonder how they’d monetize it?
Steven | Oct 5, 2008 | Reply
For the record. I’m for a Google owned SU. eBay is disgusting.
Brandon M. Sergent | Oct 5, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been on su now for nearly 3 years, think is magic.
Some of the changes that have been made so far are crap.
If they drift too far from the original su principal then the six mill are invited round to my house for a shindig and we’ll start again with stumble apon.
problem solved….
hagar | Oct 6, 2008 | Reply