By: Admin

The San Jose, California-based Internet auction giant eBay has bought StumbleUpon, which is a social website that helps people discover and share content online, for $75m (£38m). StumbleUpon is a web browser toolbar for users to share website favorites and rate them. It is a website that recommends other websites. And eBay connects hundreds of millions of people around the world every day through commerce, delivering fun, engaging and trusted online experiences.

StumbleUpon was founded in 2001 by three Canadian software engineers in Calgary. It is free for users and generates revenue through advertising, although users may pay an annual fee to avoid seeing any adverts. On this search engine, users get search results that are based on their profiles, which give them more relevant results than a regular search engine. StumbleUpon helps people find Web sites, videos, products, people and other online information based on their personal interest. It already has 2.3 million users and is adding more rapidly.

By the means of this deal eBay will get access to almost 2.5 million registered users, who recommend sites to each other. On the top of that, eBay’s Michael Buhr will become its general manager and StumbleUpon’s founders and managers will become eBay employees and work together to enhance the user experience, evolve its unique product and grow the community.

Driven by word-of-mouth, the StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent year over year and delivers approximately five million new recommendations a day to its large, highly engaged user base.

eBay is likely to integrate StumbleUpon’s recommendation service into its auctions and sales as a way to surface less-trafficked items that may be of interest to shoppers with esoteric tastes. And according to eBay this acquisition is not going to have a material impact on its financial guidance issued with its first quarter earnings release this past April.

eBay acquired online ticket vendor StubHub Inc. In February, and has previously acquired transaction facilitator PayPal and VOIP vendor Skype.

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