Ebay sells StumbleUpon back to original founders
Just about two years after eBay purchased the StumbleUpon union site, the original owners have bought back the company making it independent again.
The eBay company bought the site two years ago for 75 million dollars, but they sold it back to its original founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, along with a group of investors: Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital.
The StumbleUpon site which has been founded in 2001 was designed to send its users to websites based on recommendations by other users. The recommendations are available on the web and through a free toolbar. eBay bought the company in 2007 but, like Skype, StumbleUpon hasn’t been considerably integrated into eBay’s services although it grew from 2.3 million to about 7.4 million members, and from about 150 million recommendations per month to about 425 million.
In that time, the number of advertisers raised from a few hundred to about 20.000 advertisers.
Interesting, I have not heard about this