Friday, September 20, 2024

eBay’s Stumbleupon Acquisition Ridiculous?

The GetANewBrowser blog says that Stumbleupon’s acquisition by eBay is ridiculous.

I don’t think so. Everytime I’m on Stumbleupon I get more traffic than I’ve gotten from any other Internet site or blog other than Digg (and I’ve been on quite a few of the world’s top Web sites, including home page of BBC). There are a LOT of people using Stumbleupon and that audience is among the most engaged of all Web sites out there.

It’s interesting. On Tuesday I was over at eBay’s new North San Jose campus. There’s thousands of people working there on nothing but PayPal. I think the fact that we interact with this world via a few pixels on our screens makes us think this world doesn’t have much value. I had no idea just how many people it took to keep PayPal working great.

Those thoughts that things on your screen don’t have much value are wrong. Last night I had dinner with Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, among others from the online video industry. I shook Kevin’s hand and said “congrats, cause you’re next and now we know the true market value of Digg actually is somewhere above $40 million.

I’m also noticing another trend. Quite a few of the people I’m interviewing are getting rich. Here’s an interview I did at Stumbleupon a few months ago. One of my friends says I should ask for some equity before doing an interview. I think that’s an interesting idea, but for now everyone who gets on my show hasn’t paid to be on (except for my sponsor, Seagate).

What will eBay do with Stumbleupon? Om Malik, at dinner last night, told me he thinks this purchase is scaring Google more than any other. He notices that Google added a similar service to StumbleUpon to its toolbar.

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