SEO News Blog

eBay North America’s president, Bill Cobb, just announced that they aquired StumbleUpon.com. He said that:

StumbleUpon offers a unique finding experience that introduces people to interesting and relevant web content that has been recommended by others in the community with similar interests. StumbleUpon is a great way to explore the Internet when you’re not sure what you are looking for, or when you want to make discoveries around your particular interests.

As many of you know, StumbleUpon is a website for people that don’t know what to do with their free time and just want to surf the web pointlessly. Using the toolbar or even from StumbleUpon.com people can “stumble” websites that are noted as “interesting” from other users in the network.

The Stumbler network generates a lot of buzz and brings quite a lot of visitors. In some of our experiments we got about 23 friends of ours to “sumble thumbs up” for our website and we got immediate traffic. More than 1,000 visitors got on the website in a matter of few hours, but the traffic died as quickly as it came. The StumbleUpon algorithm seems to work on the percentage of people voting for one website for a specific amount of traffic. When you receive a lot of thumbs up for short period, you’re ranked as “hit page” and you are awarded with a lots of traffic. If this new visitors don’t like your website or simply don’t vote “thumbs up” for it, your priority is decreased and the traffic stops. On average for interesting article/photo/video or similar you can get few thousand hits and on the other hand for less interesting page you can’t get more than 100-500 visitors.

It is really interesting to know why eBay is interested in StumbleUpon as they can not be used for commercial needs. We tried to abuse Stumble-Upon so many times, but it proved to be quite pointless as this network doesn’t generate any sales leads just and stumblers don’t even bother to click on ads or anything else. The Stumblers are only looking for fun on the Internet and nothing else, so what is eBay going to do with that network?

We sow some comments on Webmasterworld.com saying that people believe eBay is only interested in getting their hands on the stumbler community and mostly on the extremely popular stumbleupon toolbar. This toolbar is installed on all Stumbler computers we suppose eBay will try to make some spy thingy to monitor user activity in order to mine data on what stumblers are interested in and spam them up with highly targeted offers. Other suspect that eBay might try again to get into Search after the failure of their previous search engine Magellan. In any case we will see when the times comes and better not speculate with it.

The battle between eBay and Google for Product Search is increasing with every passing day as Google Products is getting more and more popularity and the merchants participating in their network are growing like mushrooms after rain. eBay on the other hand is still keeping strong positions but nevertheless loosing money from the decrease of traffic and buyers that are going with Google instead of them. I’m not sure if StumbleUpon is going to help eBay with their problem and might even end up as a worthless investment, but its eBay who makes the decisions.