StumbleUpon Stumbles On With Paid Discovery

StumbleUpon

Eight months ago, StumbleUpon rolled out its Paid Discovery ad program, adding tiered pricing, expanded analytics and extending ad buys to mobile devices. Since then, the content discovery engine says the move has helped attract more brand advertisers, increase the size of campaigns and boost overall revenue.

With $17 million in fresh venture funding last March, the 100-employee company has also beefed up its ad sales force in New York and San Francisco.

“Almost overnight we’ve developed a full-fledged advertising service here that caters to the high-end, high-touch advertisers, as well as long-tail advertising,” said Marc Leibowitz, StumbleUpon's VP of business development and marketing. That’s in part because the company now has something to sell to agencies and marketers in the form of Paid Discovery.

The biggest change with the revamped ad system has been the addition of premium ad levels beyond the one-size-fits-all rate of 5 cents per view previously. Ads in StumbleUpon are woven into the stream of Web pages, videos and other content that users see each time they hit the “Stumble” button in the company’s browser toolbar or mobile app to find new sites that are matched to their interests.

As with any other content on StumbleUpon, people have the ability to vote ads up or down. The more “thumbs up” an ad gets, the better chance it has of going viral organically within the recommendation platform. A green icon or the “Sponsored” label appears in the Web toolbar or mobile interface to indicate paid content. Up to 5% of all “stumbles” are paid.

Through Paid Discovery, marketers can now pay 10 cents or 25 cents per unique user for a higher serving priority. That dictates the order in which a Web page is considered for placement, based on available inventory. Paying 25 cents per visitor buys the most traffic, in front of the most “engaged” users, 10 cents buys an “optimal” level of traffic, and 5 cents buys remnant inventory (and no mobile).

Factors used to determine a user’s engagement level include time spent, page interaction and activity and share rate. At the higher ad rates, marketers also get more extensive campaign analytics and audience targeting options. “Before March of this year, advertisers didn’t have meaningful targeting options beyond sex and age,” said Leibowitz.

The upgraded ad offering has helped StumbleUpon attract bigger brands or more spending from existing advertisers, including Intuit, Conde Nast and AOL -- and higher budgets. Weekly campaign spending among top advertisers has now grown from less than $10,000 a week to between $10,000 and $100,000, according to the company.

“We have a different mix of advertisers that have larger budgets to spend, and we’re doing a better job of targeting,” said Leibowitz. Paid Discovery has also expanded StumbleUpon advertising to smartphones and tablets. About 40% of the company’s advertisers have run campaigns in the last two months across its mobile browser and apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

One interesting difference that has emerged between desktop and mobile users is that people tend to rate content more frequently on mobile devices. Because mobile users are more active in indicating what they like or don’t like, StumbleUpon can more quickly get a fix on the type of content -- free or paid -- they want to see.

StumbleUpon advertisers now also have a larger audience to target, with the service growing from about 14 million registered users in March to more than 20 million now. That translates to about 5 million active users -- but obviously doesn’t compare with far larger social media players, like Facebook and Twitter, which boast hundreds of millions of users.

While StumbleUpon may not be about to challenge the social media giants in audience size or advertising, getting on the radar of more marketers and media buyers is the immediate goal with its updated ad system. “We’re definitely seeing more interest in brands and agencies,” said Leibowitz.

1 comment about "StumbleUpon Stumbles On With Paid Discovery ".
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  1. Carlos Pacheco from Truly Inc., November 15, 2011 at 8:16 a.m.

    I really enjoy StumbleUpon and its great that they are doing well. So MediaPost, how come there's no StumbleUpon share button on this article?

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