As rumored last month, eBay has acquired social media service StumbleUpon for $75 million in cash. The deal gives eBay access to StumbleUpon's 2.3 million users via the StumbleUpon toolbar, which allows users to "stumble" to new sites, videos, and other content within user-selected categories.
StumbleUpon's founders and management will remain with the company, which will now be led by Michael Buhr, senior director at eBay, who becomes StumbleUpon's general manager.
It's unclear at this point what eBay plans to do with StumbleUpon. Om Malik hypothesizes that eBay will add a StumbleUpon search box to the Skype client, which it acquired last year, as a "desktop backdoor." Other options include adapting the technology to eBay's core auction business, to showcase related products based on a user's bid history, or using the StumbleUpon toolbar as the entry point.
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