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StumbleUpon Claims They've Stumbled Onto Profits
cagraham writes with this excerpt from Technology Advice: "In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Mark Bartels says that StumbleUpon is now profitable, and expects to grow their revenue by 33% this year, up to $40 million. The service has been around since 2001, was briefly owned by eBay,and earlier this year cut its staff from 120 to 70. According to Bartels, a huge increase in mobile usage has led to the turn-around, and they now have over 100,000 advertising clients. Still, they didn't provide any hard profit numbers to Bloomberg, so you'll have to take them on their word that they've successfully monetized."
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The pictures of their "engineering" staff shows them all using MacBooks. Of course they're a cult.
It's a toolbar button that takes you to a semi-random web-page, picked based on other people clicking the buttons to say that they like it, and also to put it into a category. In practice it ends up like channel surfing for the internet - keep hitting the button until you see something that looks like it might be half interesting, then move on as quickly as you arrived. From what I've heard from site owners, it's a good way to direct a spike of traffic to a single page but a lousy way to actually increase your readership.
If they've now monetised it successfully, presumably they've stepped up how aggressive the paid-for insertions are since I last used it. They were already somewhat jarring - the quality level on the whole wasn't high but the ads were always a moment of "Who in the name of the blind idiot god submitted this bullshit? Oh, another ad, fuck that, moving on"
I found this website slashdot.org via StumbleUpon, and it's terrible. Would not recommend StumbleUpon.
So they let you stumble upon prostitutes? You usually need to pay extra for that. Oh, I see what you did there.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The insane level of advertisements are exactly why I stopped using the service in the first place.
They aren't even subtle. You get random "buy this product at (ludicrous price)" garbage all the time. Any semblance of discovering random neat stuff vanished in the oceans of adds years ago. I can't believe it has gotten better, especially since it's now actually profitable.
It's 40 million in revenue, not net profit. They're charging $400 per advertiser on average, if the numbers are accurate.
So I'm to understand you just learned how advertising on the Internet works today and couldn't wait to share your knowledge, yeah?
I have used stumble upon for years and I don't think I see much advertising. I have ad block on so is that it? I also block the websites of stuff that really Im really not interested in stumbling to with the thumb down menu?
Which just makes it worse. For each advertiser/customer there is a fixed minimum admin/overhead cost.
the fact that they cut from 120 to 70 people and didn't die, tells me at a minimum they focused on streamlining the overhead.
Still would be curious to see real numbers.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
What I see:
With only 70 mouths to feed, it takes $40,000,000.00 to turn a profit?
Kid-proof tablet..
I thought there had to be more to it than that. I guess I've never been bored enough to resort to a "take me to a random website" button.
Yea, a truly low margin business
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Depends how rich you are.
I used to be
SKILLED people.
I used to be
+1 Funny for the headline alone!!!