Marketing Pilgrim

Well, stop the presses, folks! Skype may have failed in its efforts to buy itself away from eBay, but that doesn’t mean the online auction site is going to be holding onto the telephony service in the long term. Today, eBay announces that they will spin Skype off with an IPO next year. Scheduled for the first half of the year, the exact timing will depend on market conditions.

Back in 2005, eBay bought Skype for $1.3B in cash and $1.3B in stock. The deal could actually pay out even more (for a maximum total of $4B), provided the telephony service met certain goals by 2008.

However, by Q307, eBay took a $1.4B impairment charge on Skype. Rumors have long circulated that eBay would sell the site, which never seemed to align with its strategy in the first place.

Nope, this isn’t just a super confusing rehash of yesterday’s story about StumbleUpon buying itself back from eBay—turns out the online auction site’s other confusing acquisition has also been seeking to free itself from its parent and reestablish itself as an independent company.

The WSJ reports that eBay welcomed Skype’s effort to raise its independent funding:

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis originally approached Ebay about repurchasing Skype, which acquired the service for $2.6 billion in 2005. Ebay encouraged them to make an offer, and the Scandinavian billionaires rounded up a group of private-equity firms to back them, the person familiar with the bid said. . . .

The proposal involved private-equity firms contributing some $1 billion to the deal, according to people familiar with the situation, though a full deal price could not be learned. The transaction also involved Ebay providing financing for the deal.

AdAge reports that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is moving closer to a proposed plan that will begin regulating viral marketing and blogs. Regardless of what side of the political fence you are on it’s starting to get a bit scary as to just how much the government wants to be the overseer of everything.

Rich Cleland, assistant director of the FTC’s advertising-practices division puts it this way

“The commission is attempting to update guidelines that are 30 years old so that they address current marketing techniques,” he said, “and in particular to address the issue of whether or not the safe harbor that’s currently allowed for ‘result not typical’-type disclaimers is still warranted.”

First there were the acquisition rumors, then the acquisition. Then there were the sale rumors. Now, eBay has sold StumbleUpon—to the social discovery app (and its funders) itself.

In May 2007, eBay purchased StumbleUpon at $75 million, to much confusion in the blogosphere. At the time, eBay was taking a “wait and see” approach before integrating any of its holdings with the sharing and discovery toolbar. Just under two years later, with the help of well-known VCs, the service is returning to its roots as an independent start up, including bringing the founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, back.

Camp, who will take the CEO role, said in the release:

We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths

Looking back at the past few months of posts here at Marketing Pilgrim it is real obvious what players dominate the search and social media landscape. I am not going to rehash those names again because you will likely read about one or more of them in the next post. One player that gets little attention is Ask.com. They are back trying to make some noise again but is anyone around to hear them?

Ask has been at this search thing for quite a while now. Now a part of IAC / InterActiveCorp the search engine has been around in some way, manner, shape or form since 1996. It even had a butler at one point . Now, however, it struggles to be more than a footnote in the search engine wars running a distant fourth in a three company race (despite seeing some increase in usage in March).

Hey did you hear that newspapers are having a tough time these days? Of course you have unless you are living under a rock. You can’t turn around without hearing more doom followed a little more gloom when it comes to the newspaper industry. As discussed here on more than a few occasions, some of these troubles are deserved while others are just part of progress. What was once cool and hip most likely will be set aside for progress unless it decides to play along. Ask those folks who thought that word processing was a fad and that the typewriter would stick around (if you still use a type writer PLEASE comment here and tell your story!)