Have you Stumbled upon StumbleUpon?

You haven’t? Not yet, you mean.

As the amount of information on the World Wide Web grew to huge proportions, things were starting to get lost in the shuffle. There are not enough hours in a day to search everything new uploaded. How do you know you are not missing something?

Enter the social media where people are talking to each other socially and can spread the word about things they like and things they don’t.

One of the latest tools is a site called StumbleUpon, where people, after registering and downloading a toolbar, can go and see what others on the network stumbled upon on the web and recommended. It is what is now called a “discovery engine”.

You are asked to put in your interests, invite your friends to join in and see what similar users have recommended. All that is being analyzed with the company’s recommendation Engine.

StumbleUpon is a mixture of social media and rating system. With these two tools they have become trend setters and a goldmine for advertisers.

The company behind it, 3 guys from Canada, founded StumbleUpon in 2001, sold it to EBay in 2007 for $75 million and in 2009 bought it back for an undisclosed amount. As of now they have over 11 million users.

StumbleVideo is another service of the company. This site allowed users without the toolbar to view videos from site like ColledgeHumor, DailyMothion, Funnyordie, Google, MetaCafe, MySpace Vimeo and YouTube.

StumbleThru is a service allowing users to stumble in youTube, The Onion, PBS and Wikipedia. Since June 2010 they extended their partnership with many more.

Since the users enter their preferences, StumbleUpon directs relevant traffic to them. Small portions are sponsored pages matching their interests. Such content in vetted by humans for quality before it is delivered. Paid accounts (called ‘sponsors’) have many more options:

• Target the audience you want.
• Traffic directly to your site, no click through.
• The more users like it, the more traffic you get.