eBay’s Forays Into Media

eBay announced earnings. Skype numbers aren’t great, certainly not enough to justify the price they paid for it. Today, however, it looks like they’re acquiring Stumbleupon. Why?

Stumbleupon is a very popular “discovery” engine, which helps users find what they would like via collective intelligence. There is always an element of surprise, and I have often found charming things by using the service. eBay is about to pay ~$45 Million for the company.

The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are “stumbled” daily. Comscore says StumbleUpon had 6 million U.S. page views in March, doubling from the prior month. Unique visitors continue to rise dramatically: 900,000 in March, which is a 3x rise over the last year.

These are great numbers, and if not for anything else, offers eBay an outlet for its massive advertising budget for acquiring customers. Today, that budget goes to Yahoo and Google, as well as numerous other media properties.

I will not be surprised at all if eBay goes shopping for a few synergistic media properties that can absorb some of this budget, and check the leakage. Here are some that I would recommend for eBay to pick up:

* Entrepreneur.com : Entrepreneur Magazine’s site that has a very strong readership among entrepreneurs and wannabes, a very likely audience for eBay to access their next series of Power Sellers through.

* Auction Bytes : Ina Steiner has created a popular newsletter with tips for eBay Buyers and Sellers. Has a very nice Alexa ranking, and an extremely targeted audience.

For a long time, I have believed that eBay should have spent money on advertising venue oriented companies, and thought that the Skype acquisition was a stupid move. Only now, it seems to me that eBay’s leadership is coming to the same conclusion!

And if you push that logic further, we get back to the same conclusion that I was at earlier on: YahooBAY.