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StumbleUpon was a discovery and advertisement engine (a form of
web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
) that pushed web content recommendations to its users. Its features allowed users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing, social-networking and advertising (sponsored pages) principles. The service shut down in June 2018. Toolbar versions existed for
Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
,
Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
,
Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...
,
Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
, and
Safari A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
. StumbleUpon also worked with some independent Mozilla-based browsers. Native mobile StumbleUpon apps existed for
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
,
iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
, Android, and the
Amazon Appstore Amazon Appstore is an app store for Android-compatible platforms operated by Amazon.com Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon. The store is primarily used as the storefront for Amazon's Android-based Fire OS. including Amazon Fire tablets, a ...
.


History

StumbleUpon was founded in November 2001 by
Garrett Camp Garrett Camp (born October 4, 1978) is a Canadian billionaire entrepreneur. He has helped build a series of companies, including founding StumbleUpon, a web-discovery tool; co-founding Uber; and founding Expa, a startup studio. Camp is chairm ...
, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd during Camp's time in graduate school at the
University of Calgary The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...
. The idea of creating a company was established before the content: of the five or six ideas for products, StumbleUpon was chosen. Camp describes in a
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
interview the moment for him in which he felt the company had really taken off: "When we passed the half a million mark (in registered users), it seemed more real." The popularity of the software attracted
Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
investor Brad O'Neill to take notice of the company and assist with a move to
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, as well as bringing in subsequent fund-raising totaling $1.2 million from other
angel investors An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...
including
Tim Ferriss Timothy Ferriss (born July 20, 1977) is an American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru. He became well-known through his ''4-Hour'' self-help book series—including ''The 4-Hour Work Week'', ''The 4-Hour Body'', and '' ...
,
Ram Shriram Kavitark Ram Shriram (born 1956/57) is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is a founding board member and one of the first investors in Google. He was earlier employed by Amazon, working for Jeff Bezos. Shriram cam ...
(Google), Mitch Kapor (Mozilla Foundation),
First Round Capital First Round is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best ...
and Ron Conway. Ferriss, Camp and Geoff Smith all lived in San Francisco, where StumbleUpon was headquartered. There were 9,238 total unique visits to social sharing sites from August 1, 2011, to January 30, 2013, among which 3,565 (38%) were via social referral, including 2,290 (64% of total social referral) from StumbleUpon, 365 (10% of total social referral) from Facebook, and 36 (1% of total social referral) from Twitter. StumbleUpon was owned by
eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...
from May 2007, when it was acquired for $75 million, until April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and other investors including Ram Shriram bought it back. In September 2012, StumbleUpon released an update for its iOS app that brought the new feature "StumbleDNA," which aggregates content that was recommended for the user, trending content as well as a section where the user could view the activity of their StumbleUpon connections. On September 25, 2012, StumbleUpon released a redesign of its website in beta, and extended it to all users on October 24. On January 16, 2013, StumbleUpon confirmed it had laid off 30% of their staff from 110 to 75 employees. On September 24, 2013, StumbleUpon acquired 5by, a video discovery app founded by Greg Isenberg. In August 2015, StumbleUpon was in financial debt and was re-acquired by Garrett Camp, who re-gained a majority share of the company. StumbleUpon was shut down in June 2018 and its accounts were transitioned to Mix.com, another content discovery venture built in part through Camp's studio startup company, Expa.


Service details

StumbleUpon used
collaborative filtering Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...
(an automated process combining
human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
opinions with
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
of personal preference) to create
virtual communities A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communi ...
of like-minded Web surfers. Ratings of websites updated a personal profile (a
blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
-style record of rated sites) and generated peer networks of web surfers linked by common interest. These social networks coordinated the distribution of web content, so that users could "stumble upon" pages explicitly recommended by friends and peers. Giving a site a thumbs up resulted in the site being placed under the user's "favorites". Furthermore, users had the ability to stumble their personal interests like "History" or "Games". Users rated a site by giving it a thumbs up, thumbs down selection on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and could optionally leave additional commentary on the site's review page, which also appeared on the user's blog. Content that was "stumbled upon" was informed by users' stated preferences, the thumbs up and down of their friends, and
demographic Demography () is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings. Demographic analysis examines and measures the dimensions and dynamics of populations; it can cover whole societies or groups defined by criteria such as edu ...
information, among other factors the company did not fully disclose. In the settings section of StumbleUpon, users could further filter the types of webpages. There were interest filters which allowed users to include only content suitable for all ages, R-rated content, or X-rated content. Users could also choose to allow stumbles with audio, video, flash and images. On October 24, 2011, StumbleUpon deleted years' worth of user-generated content, and removed HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and photoblogging capabilities. Additionally, all previous blog posts were converted from HTML to plain text, and all photos were deleted from previous blog posts. StumbleUpon stated, "Over time, we’ve come to realize that we are not able to support and scale a blogging platform, in addition to our recommendation engine."


StumbleVideo

On December 13, 2006, StumbleUpon launched their StumbleVideo site. The new site allowed users without a toolbar to "stumble" through all the videos that toolbar users had submitted and rate them using an
Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...
interface. The site aggregated videos from
CollegeHumor CollegeHumor is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles. Aside from producing content for release on YouTube, it was also a former humor website owned by InterActiveCorp ( IAC) until January 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the websi ...
,
DailyMotion Dailymotion is a French video-sharing technology platform owned by Vivendi. North American launch partners included Vice Media, Bloomberg and Hearst Digital Media. It is among the earliest known platforms to support HD (720p) resolution video. ...
,
FunnyOrDie Funny or Die is a comedy video website and film/television production company owned by Henry R. Muñoz III that was founded by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Mark Kvamme, and Chris Henchy in 2007. The website contained exclusive material from a re ...
,
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
,
MetaCafe Metacafe was an Israeli video-sharing website, launched in July 2003. During the mid-2000s, it was one of the largest video-sharing websites, though eventually began to be superseded by YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion. In August 2021, the platform' ...
, MySpace,
Vimeo Vimeo, Inc. () is an American video hosting, sharing, and services platform provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as ...
and
YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
. StumbleUpon launched a version of StumbleVideo for the
Internet Channel The Wii Menu is the graphical shell of the Wii and Wii U game console, as part of the Wii system software. It has four pages, each with a 4:3 grid, and each displaying the current time and date. Available applications, known as "channels", are ...
Web browser that ran on the
Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...
console on February 12, 2007. This version of StumbleVideo was optimized for the Wii's smaller screen resolution and offered similar functionality to that of the original version.


StumbleThru

In April 2007, StumbleUpon launched the StumbleThru service, allowing users of the toolbar to stumble within sites such as
YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
,
The Onion ''The Onion'' is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satire, satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on ...
,
Public Broadcasting Service The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educati ...
and
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
. According to the announcement of the feature, StumbleUpon planned on adding additional Web sites in the future. As of June 13, 2010, sites using StumbleThru included BBC.com,
Blogger A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
,
Break.com Break.com (formerly Big-boys.com) was an entertainment and humor website founded in 1998 that featured comedy videos, flash games, and pictures among other material. The website's target audience was men aged 18–35. After shutting down on No ...
,
CNN.com CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...
,
CollegeHumor CollegeHumor is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles. Aside from producing content for release on YouTube, it was also a former humor website owned by InterActiveCorp ( IAC) until January 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the websi ...
,
Flickr.com Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...
, FunnyorDie.com,
Howstuffworks.com HowStuffWorks is an American commercial infotainment website founded by professor and author Marshall Brain, to provide its target audience an insight into the way many things work. The site uses various media to explain complex concepts, termin ...
, HuffingtonPost.com, Metacafe.com,
Pbs.org The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...
,
PhysOrg Phys.org is an online science, research and technology news aggregator offering briefs from press releases and reports from news agencies (a form of journalism sometimes pejoratively called churnalism). The website also produces its own science ...
,
Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
,
Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...
,
The Onion ''The Onion'' is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satire, satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on ...
,
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
,
Wired.com ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fran ...
,
WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...
and YouTube. The StumbleThru service allowed registered users to stumble on specific sites like the ones listed above, rather than the entire Web.


Su.pr

In March 2009, StumbleUpon launched Su.pr, a
URL shortening URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has ...
service. It is primarily used to link to
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
and
Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
statuses and updates. This service is similar to that of
bit.ly Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, ...
and
TinyURL TinyURL is a URL shortening web service, which provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 as a way to post links in newsgroup postings which frequently had long, ...
. From March through May 2009, the su.pr service was only available to people who had received an invite code, but later, it was made available to all StumbleUpon users. In 2013, StumbleUpon discontinued the su.pr service to focus more on their lists feature.


Advertising

Paid Discovery was StumbleUpon's ad system. With Paid Discovery, an advertiser's URL (website, video, etc.) became part of the Stumble stream. Up to 5% of all stumbles were reserved for Paid Discovery where the advertisers directly inserted their web page into the user experience. This meant the audience landed directly on their web pages, videos and photos. Users could also provide feedback (thumbs up / thumbs down) on this content. Since Paid Discovery sent visitors directly to the advertiser's page, there was no need to create an ad; the advertiser's web page was the ad. When an ad was delivered to a user, a green icon or “Sponsored” would appear in the toolbar or mobile app, denoting a paid stumble. StumbleUpon did not serve typical display ad formats, such as pop-ups, interstitials or banners. Advertisers had different options for how quickly and how many users they could reach with their content, depending on their marketing objectives. Serving priority dictated the order in which their web page was considered for placement, based on available inventory. According to a 2013 fourth quarter Shareaholic's Social Media Traffic Report, StumbleUpon accounted for more publisher traffic than YouTube, Reddit, Linkedin and Google combined. Over 100,000 publishers, brands and marketers use StumbleUpon's advertising and content distribution platform in order to promote their products and services. By 2014, StumbleUpon was serving over 125 million brand and publisher sponsored placements per month.


Growth

StumbleUpon said in April 2008 that it had 5 million users, and by the end of May it would collect its five-billionth "stumble", more than one billion of which would have taken place during 2008. StumbleUpon claimed to have more than 10 million members as of 18 May 2010. In August 2011, StumbleUpon reached the 25 billion stumble mark, at which point they were adding over 1 billion stumbles per month. In April 2012, StumbleUpon announced that it had over 25 million registered users.


See also

*
Rockmelt Rockmelt is a discontinued proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas f ...
*
Social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social ...
*
Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...
*
Webring A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites Hyperlink, linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among a ...


References


External links


Official website
(Archive) {{DEFAULTSORT:Stumbleupon Defunct social networking services Internet properties established in 2001 Internet properties disestablished in 2018 2007 mergers and acquisitions 2009 mergers and acquisitions