Of all the social media sites out there, StumbleUpon is by far my favorite.

From an SEO standpoint, I’ve used it to generate instant traffic and awareness of client websites and, from a personal standpoint, I’ve used it to discover hundreds more websites than I ever could through traditional search.

This week I’m taking a look StumbleUpon, by the numbers:

• StumbleUpon was created in 2001 by three friends who were still finishing off post-graduate studies in Calgary, Canada.

• Silicon Valley investor Brad O'Neill assisted with a move to San Francisco and the initial round of $1.2 million in fund-raising.

• Initial group of investors included Ram Shriram (Google), Mitch Kapor (Mozilla Foundation), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), and Ron Conway.

• Premium ads in StumbleUpon start at 5 cents per targeted visitor. Plans on the way to do the same with Stumble-Video.

• In July 2006, StumbleUpon reached 1 million users.

• In December 2006, StumbleUpon launched their StumbleVideo site at http://video.stumbleupon.com

• A version of StumbleVideo for the Opera browser that runs on the Wii console was released on February 12, 2007

• March 2007 revenue estimates show revenues at approximately $60,000+.

• In April 2007, StumbleUpon launched the StumbleThru service at http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumblethru.php

• In May of 2007 eBay acquired StumbleUpon for $75,000,000

• StumbleUpon has since been named the number one social media company on the web by Business 2.0 magazine.

• They currently have over 2.3 million registered users, serve 5 million daily recommendations, and are experiencing a 150% year over year growth rate.

• A new Facebook application was released in June 2007 at the same time the company announced that they reached the 2 billion mark for content that’s been stumbled upon.

• An advertiser's site is shown to StumbleUpon users as often as every 20 "stumbles"

• StumbleUpon has over 3.55 million members as of October 3rd, 2007.

• StumbleUpon has about 12 million sites in its database

• There are 7.5 million “stumbles” performed every day.

• Stumbled sites can expect anywhere from 50-50,000 visitors per post.

• StumbleUpon has momentum. Reddit and Digg usage has dropped dramatically over the past year while StumbleUpon is doubling usage from a year ago!

• Average demographic profile of the top 50 Stumblers shows that they’re a 35 year old Male, member for 18 months, like over 12,000 pages, 500 videos and 1,000 photos.

• From personal experience, I’ve found StumbleUpon traffic to have among the lowest bounce rate average (29%) highest new visitor rate (97%) and most pages viewed per vist (4.26).

StumbleUpon is a fantastic way to travel around the web. It’s a fun and very compelling tool but, be warned, it's highly addictive!

Happy Stumbling!

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5 clever comments

[...] Social Media by the Numbers [...]

Internet Wasteland » Blog Archive » The Stumble Gremlin  ^#

Thanks for the link, and I think that you've wrote a great piece here

Going to submit it to Sphinn

Glen Allsopp  ^#

Ugh what an idiot, I see it's already submitted

Good stuff

Glen Allsopp  ^#

[...] Social Media By the Numbers: StumbleUpon [...]

8 StumbleUpon Articles From Stumblers Like You And Me!  ^#

Hi Tom,

I agree Stumbleupon is great. In fact I've Stumbled one of the articles on this site!

When I was Stumbled I got a huge traffic blip – it was fun.

jim  ^#