eBay has bought StumbleUpon, a site for sharing web sites, for around $75 million. The press release says it's grown 150% over the past year and "delivers approximately five million new recommendations a day to its large, highly engaged user base". What eBay doesn't explain is why. With previous purchases such as PayPal, Skype and Shopping.com, there did seem to be a rationale, but this one escapes me.
StumbleUpon currently has tabs for Websites, People and Videos, so it could possibly add one for Bargains on eBay, but that doesn't sound particularly useful.
The StumbleUpon blog says:
Looking to the future, we think that joining eBay is the right thing to do to help us to grow StumbleUpon to its full potential. We think eBay is a great fit for us because eBay and StumbleUpon share similar approaches - we're both driven by our community of users, and we are both dedicated to connecting people.
Since it's increasingly hard to find a Web site nowadays that isn't driven by connecting its community of users, this will give eBay lots of scope for future takeovers.
There are no such doubts about today's other takeover: Google buys Panoramio. The Panoramio blog says:
The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence.
Of course, Google buys so many companies that it hardly seems worth mentioning the smaller ones....
