Six months ago, it was a fair question to ask where the Web 2.0 exits were? Because for all of the ink spilled and money invested on them, profitable exits were sparse. That is changing in a hurry. After a yearend scare when a few consumer Internet failures led many to pronounce the movement dead, exits are emerging fast.

Google is reportedly negotiating to purchase job search engine SimplyHired. I find this nearly impossible to believe but if the news is being attributed to reliable sources, my disbelief may eventually have to disappear.

eBay is negotiating to purchase social bookmark startup StumbleUpon. This seems to me like a replay of the Skype deal on a small scale for eBay; it's a cool technology with a growing user base that the company may one day figure out how to integrate into its auction platform. Well, at least eBay gets a few deals right. Namely, StubHub and PayPal.

PaidContent is reporting that Yahoo paid $51.6 million in stock for online talent contest web site, Bix.com, in November. That's a staggering amount for such an early stage company. If not for the $6.7 million Bix raised from Trinity Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, it would have been even more impressive for the startup.

And the big news that Fox is paying $250 million with a $50 million earnout for Photobucket is additional evidence that big-time Web 2.0 exits exist beyond YouTube, MySpace and Facebook (it's only a matter of time). As I predicted last month, the Photobucket shutdown was nothing more than a negotiating ploy. As I didn't predict, the price is reported to be $300 million. News Corp. must have decided that the level of lock-in among Photobucket users was so high that MySpace risked losing a significant number of its own users if it didn't bring them into the fold. I'd love to see the analysis supporting that.

Tags: simplyhired, google, ebay, stumbleupon, yahoo, bix, myspace, photobucket, vc, venture+capital.