Ebay Unacquires StumbleUpon
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I recall talk about a grand vision of users calling one-another to negotiate deals and terms, but it looks like eBay has never really pulled the trigger. Perhaps they're trying to stay in a league with Google and Amazon, who have shown significant versatility in their service offerings - but eBay has definitely fallen flat if that was their intention.
I wouldn't be surprised to see eBay spin off Skype eventually too in favor of a leaner organization.
Still, I've never felt compelled to run a paid campaign, and perhaps that's the problem.
Google adwords is pretty straightforward. But it still took advertisers years to figure out how to use it properly. We basically build sites & even site building tools & other tools, with the ultimate goal of making Adwords work well. The fact that there are millions of consultants & employees & blog posts & ebooks that know how to make adwords pay is a big part of why adwords works.
It works for a lot of things. But it also doesn't work for a lot of things. It's terrible at selling Coca Cola.
Scale is a secret sauce in reaching this kind of maturity.
Stumbleupon probably has a lot of opportunities hidden in it for advertisers. But finding them & letting the right advertisers about them is the key.
The key is to subscribe to lots of people who are similar to you and then stumble on the "friends only" channel.
I assume it all depends on the terms of the acquisition. For instance, did eBay originally not get full rights to the StumbleUpon brand? Is there a formal negotiation process to settle these types of disputes?
Of course, any deal can have any terms-- but 99% of acquisitions like this include the brand.