23 Musings

Every holiday season to date Ebay has had more eyeballs and more pages viewed than Amazon. Until this year that is.

Nielsen has confirmed that in the run up to Christmas Amazon.com has received 59,624,000 visitors compared to Ebays 59,374,000.

Not a massive difference I hear you cry. True; but Ebay has actually seen a 10% drop in December traffic year on year. That must be worrying for the senior management. Amazon has seen 18% growth year on year.

Ebay still has more pages viewed and time spent on it but in terms of users Amazon now leads the way.

Rumours are rife over the future of StumbleUpon, the user rating web discovery platform. I like it, it tends to deliver me decent websites that I find interesting and therefore can be useful.

The rumour is that eBay are going to buy them for somewhere around the $50m mark. That's a good mark-up considering their $1.5m seed funding they've had so far.

It would appear like a rash buy that is purely going ahead to try to stop anyone else from buying them, but there are aspects of StumbleUpon that make it a decent fit, primarily the community aspect (what with eBay having a huge community).

Not wanting to be outdone, Google have announced new functionality for their toolbar which is basically a StumbleUpon type feature. The toolbar now includes a dice icon, click it and you’ll be taken to a new website that Google thinks you’ll find interesting based on your previous search queries. This isn’t exactly like StumbleUpon but the end result is the same - discovery of new websites based on your interests.