eBay Revamps StumbleUpon To Make More Money (Not For Sale?)
By Anna Johnson on October 6th, 2008Maybe the rumors aren’t true. Maybe eBay is NOT planning to sell StumbleUpon after all. Or maybe it’s making a last-ditch effort to turn the ‘social discovery’ engine into a money maker before it decides whether to keep or sell it.
Whatever the case, eBay plans to revamp the service with new revenue generating features.
To date, StumbleUpon has made money by delivering a paid webpage for every 20 or 30 webpages delivered to its approximately 6 million users. Now eBay plans to extend those ads to more people by enabling them to use StumbleUpon without the tool bar. The company is also introducing a partner program to allow individual websites to offer StumbleUpon on their properties. The four initial partners are HowStuffWorks.com, HuffingtonPost.com, National Geographic.com, and Rolling Stone.com.
StumbleUpon’s advertisers – ranging from big names such as Condé Nast, Scientific American, and Forbes to small Internet marketers – currently pay a flat five cents per impression ($50 CPM), and the minimum bid is in the $20 range.
