How StumbleUpon is winning on the web. StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp At nearly ten years old, StumbleUpon is certainly well past the point of attracting users by being a new and hot trend.
But the San Francisco-based web discovery engine has proven that slow and steady growth can still lead to success: Earlier this month, StumbleUpon surpassed Facebook to become the biggest traffic driver among social media startups in the US. Given Facebook’s status as a media darling, its being unseated by the decidedly lower profile StumbleUpon has taken some people by surprise.
I sat down last week with StumbleUpon co-founder and CEO Garrett Camp to find out exactly how the company has ascended to this point — and where it plans to go in the weeks and months ahead. StumbleUpon Stumbles Upon a Better Ad Model: Paid Discovery: Tech News and Analysis « StumbleUpon Unveils Paid Discovery, Its New “No Click” Ad Platform. Content discovery engine StumbleUpon, which most recently received 17 million in Series B funding, is unveiling a new ad platform today, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery.
Whereas the old Stumble ad model was primarily targeted to getting traffic for publishers, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp tells me that Paid Discovery is setting its sights on bigger brands, like movie studios promoting a movie or stuff like NFL teams promoting their sites. Paid Discovery ads (which can range in format from websites, videos to mobile sites etc) will show up in a Stumbler’s stream without them having to click on a banner or other kind of intermediary mechanism. Advertisers can drill down on the targeting the ads as well, by around 500 different topics and demographics like age, gender and location as well as by mobile platorm. Users can also rate the quality of the ads, and more upvotes means additional (free) traffic. StumbleUpon Raises $17 Million in Funding.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- StumbleUpon, a discovery engine, today announced that it has completed a $17 million Series B round of financing.
The funding will be used to continue to invest in the company's core discovery technology, expand to new platforms and grow the employee base. The financing includes investments from Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo Ventures. The previous round of funding was led by Accel Partners, August Capital and Sherpalo Ventures. StumbleUpon Wants To Be The "I Don't Know What I Want" Button On Your Phone, TV, Computer And Everywhere Else. StumbleUpon Growth Accelerates Post eBay Spin Out, eBay acquired discovery engine StumbleUpon for $75 million in May 2007 while the six-year old start-up was finally experiencing rapid growth, having tripled in size the over the prior six months to reach 1.4 million visitors according to comScore.
While the site doubled in size over the year after it was acquired, the site eventually stalled under eBay’s ownership. StumbleUpon’s Android App Discovery Feature: 1 Million Stumbles And Counting. Discovery engine StumbleUpon recently announced App Discovery, a free beta feature of its Android app that basically suggests mobile apps based on a user’s individual interests and preferences and those of friends and like-minded users.
Turns out people love to stumble, even on the go. Asked if the feature has taken off, the company told me that, in the 2 weeks following its release, they’ve recorded more than 1 million App stumbles already. StumbleUpon Brings Its Serendipitous Discovery To The iPhone And Android. On a desktop computer, StumbleUpon makes sense.
You’re on the prowl for cool stuff, click a button and find it. But there is a ton of competition these days among services that let you do this — and increasingly people are relying on Twitter and Facebook for this. But mobile is a different beast. A tailored, contained experience for the small screen is welcomed.
That’s exactly what StumbleUpon has built with their iPhone and Android apps. If you’ve ever used StumbleUpon, you’ll be familiar with how to use this app. With the click of a bottom you can also share any page via email, Twitter, or Facebook. But there’s also a way to use the app that’s perfect for the small screens of the iPhone and Android phones. Below that “Best for” area, there’s also a list of your topics (the areas you’ve indicated you’re interested in on StumbleUpon) so you can stumble that way as well.
You can find the app in the App Store here. Stumble. This evening I’m going to attend the StumbleUpon’s 10 Million Stumblers Party.
Wow — 10 million people using StumbleUpon is a major milestone for a company that has gone through so many ups and downs. I remember the first time co-founder Garrett Camp stopped by for a cup of coffee at the Starbucks right across from Business 2.0′s office, where I was working at the time. A gawky, scrawny kid from Canada, he couldn’t stop talking about contextual information, social sharing and how he wanted to use game theory to make the web more fun. This was long before the company raised money and became the hot new thing, and before it was acquired (by eBay for $75 million), then sold and re-funded. I always thought StumbleUpon was a great little company that was building a structured database for the relevant web, something that Facebook is now trying to do with its Like button. To celebrate the occasion, here’s a video of Camp rocking out at FooCamp. StumbleUpon: The Silent Social Media Success Story. When you think of social media, two products immediately come to mind: Facebook and Twitter.
If you're in the technical world, you'd probably also mention Digg and Slashdot. A product that is rarely talked about among social media products, but has a surprisingly large footprint on the Web, is StumbleUpon. It now has 10.6 million users and regularly pushes big traffic to online publishers. According to a new analysis by Web analytics company Woopra, StumbleUpon drives nearly twice as much traffic than Digg. StatCounter uncovered a similar trend recently, with StumbleUpon second only to Facebook among social media traffic drivers. Source: Woopra How it Works "Explore the web like never before," declares the StumbleUpon sign up page.