Jacob has been with eBay for nine years and his current role was General Manager of eBay Classifieds Group. He’s obviously a man who likes spending money as he claims to have spent 5 billion bucks of eBay’s cash on Skype, Shopping.com, Marktplaats.nl, mobile.de, Rent.com, Gumtree, Loquo, Opusforum, BilBasen and dba.dk.

As with many eBay executives Jacob hails from Harvard Business School and joined eBay just six months after Doug McCallum who he replaces.

Devin Wenig, President of eBay Marketplaces who chose Jacob for the role commented “I’m thrilled that Jacob will head our European region. With almost 10 years of experience at eBay, Jacob understands our business deeply, and he has proven ability to lead and grow a portfolio of consumer-focused businesses across diverse markets. Along with our talented European team, I’m confident Jacob will continue our commerce leadership and momentum across the region”.

The appointment will now free Doug McCallum who becomes a Senior Advisor to eBay Inc.’s President and CEO, John Donahoe. He will advise the company on a wide range of matters important to eBay Inc.’s continued acceleration including enterprise partner engagement, senior government relations, and leadership development.

Whether they’ll make their money back remains to be seen. Page views per visitor rose from an average 7 in 2007, to 19 in 2008, and registered SU users increased from 5m in April to 6m now: that last statistic is, of course, as meaningless as “registered eBay users”. Actual visitors to the site fell by around 70% from 4.4m in July 2007 to 1.3m in July 2008: its fans may be devoted, but its hard to see StumbleUpon as a hot property.

Frankly, the eBay/SU marriage never made a whole bunch of sense. Even StumbleUpon’s blog struggled to find anything that made sense to say about it. “We’re both driven by our community of users, and we are both dedicated to connecting people” seems a deeply woolly excuse to spend $75million, and I’d be tempted to see Meg’s shopaholic tendency behind the purchase.

No more. eBay are rationalising their relationships. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that eBay will be extending their classified ads business:

Jacob Aqraou, general manager of eBay’s global classified business, said he expects the company will take over a “fair” number of companies in the next six months or so. In an interview, Mr. Aqraou said lackluster economic growth and the deepening credit crunch have depressed prices for private companies to such a degree that it now makes more sense to buy established classifieds properties than build new services from scratch. He said eBay’s strategy was to target classified-ad sites that have leading positions in geographies and industry segments in which eBay doesn’t currently compete.

Classified ads are said to be eBay’s fastest growing unit. By using established sites to “fill in the gaps” in their current offerings – Aqraou mentions Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, where eBay’s hold is currently very weak – they can expand at minimal cost and with little risk.

eBayers can also expect to see closer ties between these classified sites and the main eBay marketplace: Auctionbytes reports that eBay sent emails to New York-based users last week, advertising their own free local classifieds site, Kijiji.