When a company with 13 million users is outpacing one with 500 million on one specific metric. additional context is needed to understand exactly what is going on behind the recent growth curve.

I spoke with Camp earlier today about what exactly this recent news means for the company and why StumbleUpon seems to be killing it since August, clocking in about 1.9 million unique visits in November according to Comscore and serving up over 700 million “Stumbles” (pageviews to other websites) in December 2010 versus 400 million Stumbles in December of 2009, according to internal analytics.

Camp says that the service has been growing at 20% month over month since it introduced StumbleUpon for the iPhone and Android in August and an iPad app in April. Mobile engagement, which represents 5% of all Stumbles, is growing at 40%. Web-only Stumbling, also a new addition to the vast oeuvre of browser plugins and toolbars, is growing at a 25% rate. The site also gains around 500-600K new registered users monthly on average and boasts a 40% DAU rate.

“We’re becoming a little more useful” says Camp on the recent traffic spikes, “Discovery as opposed to keyword search is just a better way to find information.”Camp also explains the discrepancy between Facebook and StumbleUpon’s usership vs. referral traffic as such, “Facebook is by design trying to keep you on Facebook, but with us every time you click we’re sending referrals to other sites,” he continues, “like Google our goal is to take you to a new site.”

Says VP of Business Development Marc Leibowitz:

“The growth curve has also steepened recently because of the introduction of more overtly social features (eg, finding & inviting real-world friends) to complement the less obvious but long-standing social aspects of StumbleUpon (eg, algorithmically determined like-minded users); the improving usability of the service (eg, “show me more from [this domain, topic, user]“; better onboarding); and probably the overall proliferation of content, which has increased the demand for easy-to-use, adaptive curation tools like StumbleUpon (see also Google’s experiments w News & Reader).”

The site is also breaking even according to Camp, and at around 65 employees that means revenue is in the ballbark of 10 million annually (When asked if this guess was accurate, Leibowitz told me “You’re not bad at math.” This is not true.). In any case, beating Facebook at something is a hell of a way to start 2011 strong. Congrats guys.

0 0
1 1

2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7

Authors: Alexia Tsotsis

to know more click here