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Consider it the Internet equivalent of channel surfing.
For anyone who has ever wanted to just sit and “see what's on” without dedicating themselves to an episode of House or Lost and wants to replicate that experience on the Internet, StumbleUpon.com might be something to consider.
The site's co-founder, Garrett Camp says StumbleUpon is a “portal to discovery” on the Internet, where Web surfers can search through millions of user-submitted photos, videos and articles grouped together by subjects.
“It's much more like channel surfing than using a search engine,” he said in an interview at the mesh08 conference in Toronto on Thursday.
StumbleUpon.com co-founder Garrett Camp speaks Thursday at the mesh08 conference in Toronto. Mr. Camps describes StumbleUpon as a portal to discovery on the Internet, where Web surfers can search through millions of user-submitted photos, videos and articles grouped together by subjects. (Rannie Turingan/For the Globe and Mail)
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“But instead of flipping through commercial video content through your cable box, you're flipping through interesting photos, videos and articles online recommended by people you know,” he said.
But StumbleUpon can go beyond the finding powers of traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo. By incorporating elements of social media, it is offering advertisers a unique ability to market to users with particular tastes and interests, and the opportunity to glean instant feedback from their campaigns in a way that was not readily available before.
Sorting through the clutter of new Web pages that are created every day can be challenging for many users, Mr. Camp said, and regular search engines aren't as helpful when it comes to pursuing an interest on the Internet.
“You can only search for what you know exists,” he said. “Or if you don't know what something is called, that limits what you can find. When people come to StumbleUpon, they don't type in a query or have a specific need in mind, they just want to discover interesting content.”
StumbleUpon is a browser add-on which can be installed in either Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer or Mozilla's FireFox. Users enter the kind of content they are interested in finding, choosing from a list of about 500 topics ranging from sports to humour to finance, and the site's database generates a list of web pages that have been submitted and recommended by other users to check out.
Depending on how much a user likes a certain page, they can give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The more positive reactions a site gets, the higher up in the rankings it will appear in a fashion similar to sites such as Digg.com and Reddit.com.
The site now boasts more than five-million registered users, who submit between 25,000 and 30,000 new pages to the database every day. More than 12-million “stumbles” are performed on a daily basis and the service is currently one of the top 10 installation add-ons for the FireFox browser.
All that usage has not gone unnoticed. Last year, Mr. Camp – a University of Calgary graduate – and his partners sold the site to online auction kingpin eBay.com, based in San Jose, Calif., for $75-million (U.S.).
Advertisers are also starting to pay attention. In each batch of returns that a user gets when they query a subject are a handful of sponsored links. The links can be rated the same way as the regular content, with users marking them with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
For users, it means the sponsored links that appear closest to the top are the ones judged to be the most useful by their peers, while marketers are given a conduit to instant feedback on their campaigns.
“I don't know of any other system where the advertising is actively rated by every single user,” Mr. Camp said.
By having users determine the popularity of an ad and how often it should appear in searches allows the site to keep the quality of the advertisements high and in-step with the other regular content, Mr. Camp said.
This way, the site hopes to avoid some of the user backlash that sites such as Facebook have endured while attempting to create user-driven advertising programs which recommend certain products and services.
“Naturally people are going to have a slight aversion to things that are commercial,” he said. “But we try to keep that very small, and right now the quality of commercial and regular content is very similar.”
Some advertisers are already launching a number of simultaneous campaigns within StumbleUpon as a way of gauging audience reaction.
Mr. Camp said the site can be an effective means of promoting new products and services as well as photo galleries or blogs by independent creators that may be difficult to define in a search field at google.com.
Punching in “artistic black and white photography” likely won't yield very many effective links via a search engine, Mr. Camp said.
“No one is ever going to type that into a search engine, but they do like it when they see it,” he said.
