Stumbleupon

• eBay wants to sell StumbleUpon and is firm at $75M.
• They have hired Deutsche Bank to handle the sale of the service (not business), and they have been seen whoring the pitch around town to potential buyers.
• Who is their realistic buyer? I think that unless they put it up for auction on eBay itself, their only option is to walk it into Barry Diller’s office at IAC who will probably pay $40M for it and hedge that the future of the new in-browser StumbleUpon will jump start traffic and revenue from the flatline. Barry could use a new business, his stock was down another 6% yesterday.
• Stumble’s most promising feature is their ability to white label the service and let more people than The Huffington post use it for helping its readers find interesting articles found within their site. They should be able to capture licensing fees for it, since it’s a useful tool that helps blogs and news sites to receive more page views, earn more money, increase site time and increase user engagement.

TC

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