This Week in M&A Issue #226

eBay Inc. is acquiring Depop, the mobile-first secondhand fashion marketplace, from Etsy, Inc. for roughly $1.2 billion in cash.

Depop’s marketplace had about 7 million active buyers and 3 million sellers at the end of 2025, with nearly 90% of buyers under 34. The platform drove roughly $1 billion in gross merchandise sales last year and saw strong growth, especially in the U.S.

At a glance, this looks like routine marketplace consolidation. It is more strategic than that.

Etsy bought Depop in 2021 for $1.625 billion. Selling it for $1.2 billion represents roughly a $400 million loss. For Etsy, the sale is about refocusing. Depop never fully aligned with Etsy’s core marketplace or margin profile. Rather than continue investing management time and capital, Etsy is taking liquidity and concentrating on its primary platform.

For eBay, the move addresses a structural issue. eBay’s user base skews older. Its strength has long been collectibles, parts, and hard-to-find inventory. It has struggled to win younger consumers, particularly those aged 18 to 24 who spend time on social platforms.

Depop changes that dynamic. Around 90% of its 7 million active buyers are under 34. The platform is built around social discovery and peer-to-peer fashion resale. Acquiring Depop gives eBay immediate access to a younger customer base and a defensible position in secondhand fashion.

But the acquisition isn’t without integration risk. Depop operates more like a social network with commerce built in. eBay is optimized for search, structured listings, and standardized processes. If eBay forces Depop into legacy systems too aggressively, user engagement could suffer.

The outcome will depend on whether eBay can add operational depth without diluting the community and culture that made Depop valuable.

Wondering why your site doesn’t show up in Google Discover?

New SDK findings have revealed how Google Discover decides what content to show and why some pages never surface in the feed.

Google Discover is not a random carousel of trending content. It’s a structured pipeline with multiple checkpoints that a page must pass before it ever gets ranked or shown. The system first evaluates eligibility, and if your page fails early filters, it never reaches the ranking stage.

The pipeline includes: crawling and interpreting your content, reading key metadata like the title and image, categorizing the type of content, checking for blocks, matching to user interests, estimating the likelihood of a click, building the feed, delivering it, and then collecting feedback.

A few key takeaways from the research:

Hard filters happen first
If a user has blocked your site, the system will never rank your content for them. This block occurs before any interest matching or click‑prediction work begins.

Ranking isn’t search ranking
Discover uses a server‑side click‑prediction model to estimate how likely a user is to click your content. Signals include your page’s title, the quality and size of your images, content freshness, historical engagement, and whether images successfully load.

Fresh content wins
Pages between 1 and 7 days old get the strongest reach, with visibility declining as content ages. There is a separate classification for evergreen pieces, but newer content generally gets priority.

Images and metadata matter
Without an image, your page won’t get a Discover card. To earn prominent placements, you need images at least 1200px wide. The system reads multiple meta tags, and missing or restrictive tags can block entry altogether.

Experimentation causes variability
Google runs hundreds of experiments at once, so similar users can see very different feeds. Discover can also reorder content in real time as someone scrolls.

Essentially, success in Discover depends on meeting strict eligibility checks, prioritizing strong visuals and clear titles, and maintaining ongoing user engagement rather than trying to “optimize” for Discover-like search.