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StumbleUpon becomes the next social media service to get snagged today. Businesswire reports on the purchase, which cost $75-million dollars. Early press releases indicate that eBay plans to leave the fast growing social bookmarking service as it is, preferring to keep it in its current form and waiting to see which direction it can grow in the future.

While there are social media services presently bigger and more successful, acquiring StumbleUpon appears to be a smarter business purchase. Their users are more varied and, potentially, more receptive to eBay’s future marketing thrusts than other social media services like Digg or Reddit. They have also gained a lot of positive press over the last couple of years and established a strong brand in the industry. The downloadable toolbar plugin that comes with StumbleUpon is definitely a huge reason for the purchase as it allows eBay prime advertising space for numerous services and products.

StumbleUpon serves approximately 5 million webpages daily based on collaborative filtering, which combines community opinions with the user’s personal preferences to show only the most relevant pages to each user. They have recently launched StumbleVideo and StumbleThru services, which expands on their core product.

The purchase will grant eBay desktop access to more than 2.3 million Stumblers who have installed Stumbleupon’s toolbar in their browsers. This user base has grown at an impressive rate of 150% year over year in 2007 and is predicted to gain even more traction throughout the year.

What can we expect from all this? StumbleShopping is the first thing that comes to mind. Imagine using StumbleUpon’s algorithm to serve highly-targeted and personally relevant products to each consumer. While eBay hasn’t released any statement indicating such, it’s definitely something to look out for in everybody’s mind.