Ebay + Stumble Upon = a Big Deal ?

eBay has taken the idea of supply chain efficiency off the scale. Now add to eBay one very popular discovery engine with in depth profiling intelligence, and you have the makings of something truly impressive, almost scary.

In eBay Close to Acquiring StumbleUpon on TechCrunch, Duncan Riley mentions the potential acquisition and asks the million dollar questions, not directly but…

If the deal is finalized it’s an interesting move by eBay. Paypal was core to eBay’s Auction business. Skype could be justified as a tie into the Auction business as well. So where does StumbleUpon sit? People “stumbling” from site to site with a business model (that) revolves around selling page views seems like an odd fit. A sign that eBay is looking to expand into new markets perhaps? Time will tell.

Which I’ll paraphrase as ‘What’s the synergy and where’s the golden egg?’

I’d also bet on some form of expansion. $75 million is a lot of money to fork out, but push marketing is only as successful as the behavioural profiling it is guided by and the competition for the consumpteriat’s dollar hotting up. For example, the only way anyone is ever going to compete with Google’s advertising business is by being one step ahead.

So we are not just talking contextually relevant targeting, but behavioural targeting, and beyond that predictive marketing.

Its not just about showing someone ads that somehow relate to what they’re actually looking at, at any given time, but what they are likely to be interested in 5 or 10 clicks down the line. The techcrunch article mentions that StumbleUpon’s ‘knowledge base’ is expanding at about 4+ million sites, per day. All those sites are not only being rated by humans but in the process also being annotated and organised and cross referenced. Now let’s think back to what made Google great in the first place.

No, not their patented PigeonRank™:-), but that’s close.

eBay already have operations established in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom

eBay also owns Skype and PayPal.

StumbleUpon does insert advertising between stumbles, less than 2% of stumbles (not sure if its CPM orCPA) according to Wikkipedia who also mentions SU currently have over 2 000 000 users, or stumblers.

Just to speculate, I don’t think the synergy eBay is after is anything as banal as placing offers in the SU pages, or stumbling from auction to auction – though that may be very effective in terms of getting people to notice all those wonderful things they didn’t know they needed until they were surprised with them. SU is a remarkably ‘long tail’ oriented affair, case in point…

StumbleUpon » Help
Why don’t you show average ratings for websites or top 100 lists?

Because these statistics foster a competitive atmosphere that would promote spamming among owners of the sites in question. StumbleUpon is based on showing people sites personalized to their particular interests, not on absolutes like average rating and top 100 lists.

Who better to investigate the frontier country of niche interests and the heterogeneous individuals that make up the virtual communities that persue them.

Are we looking at the dawn of intelligence based marketing?

Let’s just hope they don’t muck-up StumbleUpon – it’s an amazing and beautiful thing.

Update

It’s a done deal.