The problem with sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and now Twitter is that for one second they are super hot and useful, until online marketers find out about them at some conference and destroy them.

How true that is, and of course that leaves the giant unsolved problem - how to keep a site vibrant and interesting once the marketers and SEO types discover it. This site seems to be trying new things but a visit to the new section suggests it's not invulnerable. Presumably killing them all isn't a viable solution, so either everyone periodically moves on to the next new hot site, or we learn to live with them (and them with us).

I'm not sure what eBay was planning on doing with StumbleUpon in the first place. Same with Skype - it's been three years seemingly without any real integration of the services.

I recall talk about a grand vision of users calling one-another to negotiate deals and terms, but it looks like eBay has never really pulled the trigger. Perhaps they're trying to stay in a league with Google and Amazon, who have shown significant versatility in their service offerings - but eBay has definitely fallen flat if that was their intention.

I wouldn't be surprised to see eBay spin off Skype eventually too in favor of a leaner organization.

Maybe their plan wasn't so much integration as it was diversification.

The plan was to mask a deceleration in growth of the main eBay platform while they bought time to fix it. Whoops.

Not true. They explicitly planned for integration in much the way GP describes.

I don't think I've ever met anyone under 40 who uses StumbleUpon. I learned about it from my dad.

I use it daily, and have for quite a while (26). As a publisher, I've received more traffic from SU than any other source.

Still, I've never felt compelled to run a paid campaign, and perhaps that's the problem.

I disagree. I think that stumbleupon (assuming long term popularity) has the potential to be a great place to advertise but... it's not that simple.

Google adwords is pretty straightforward. But it still took advertisers years to figure out how to use it properly. We basically build sites & even site building tools & other tools, with the ultimate goal of making Adwords work well. The fact that there are millions of consultants & employees & blog posts & ebooks that know how to make adwords pay is a big part of why adwords works.

It works for a lot of things. But it also doesn't work for a lot of things. It's terrible at selling Coca Cola.

Scale is a secret sauce in reaching this kind of maturity.

Stumbleupon probably has a lot of opportunities hidden in it for advertisers. But finding them & letting the right advertisers about them is the key.

I think it's a sample size issue - I don't know anyone over 30 who uses it. Although, admittedly, I've been using it much less lately (less time to procrastinate than I did as a pure student, and I use MeFi, YC, and Reddit more)

We've been finding it a pretty interesting way to do advertising actually, and we've seen very few people over 40 coming through. Hard to tell if it's just the demographics/interests we chose, though.

I've used SU almost daily for several years. Coolest thing since sliced bread.

The key is to subscribe to lots of people who are similar to you and then stumble on the "friends only" channel.

Are there any articles explaining what needs to be done for a startup to be become independent again? I find it interesting that they can keep the StumbleUpon brand with no problem.

I assume it all depends on the terms of the acquisition. For instance, did eBay originally not get full rights to the StumbleUpon brand? Is there a formal negotiation process to settle these types of disputes?

Of course eBay got full rights to the SU brand. eBay essentially just SOLD StumbleUpon (to the original founders and some investors). Presumably they did the same thing that the founders did when they sold it to eBay in the first place-- they sold the brain/domain with it.

Of course, any deal can have any terms-- but 99% of acquisitions like this include the brand.