More movement in the social bookmarking arena as yesterday ebay confirmed that they had moved in to buy StumbleUpon for a valuation of $75 million.

Quite where the synergies are is yet to be revealed, but it is interesting to see the moves into this area by the big boys, perhaps hitching a ride on a growing bandwagon? There was of course the much bigger move in this arena by Yahoo at the end of 2005 when they bought deli.cio.us and no doubt there will be others in the wings.

As far as StumbleUpon goes, well there have certainly been lots of developments since I first stumbled across it (sic!) about a year ago – I was then recommended to have another look at it by Des Walsh earlier this year and certainly the functionality has advanced a great deal as have the number of subscribers using the system.

By way of a test, I am also trying a small experiment by marketing through them – specific pages are shown to people expressing an interest in the areas I nominate and a “per view” payment is made. You can also specify people your site is shown to by geographic region and age which allows better targeting. So far no-one has gone on to explore my site further having “Stumbled Upon” it or taken up any of the calls to action, but I’ll keep monitoring and report back.

All in all, interesting moves afoot and I foresee an early start in ebay pushing traffic StumbleUpon’s way.

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