Two sources have confirmed that the rapidly growing StumbleUpon recently approached at least one large Internet company to be acquired. The asking price was $50 million.
The deal doesn’t appear to have been widely shopped - one potential acquiror said that they met with the company recently, but only to explore possible business development deals, and that an acquisition was not discussed. I spoke briefly with StumbleUpon CEO Garret Camp this afternoon but he refused to comment, saying “we do not comment on rumors.” Fair enough.
The real story may be a disconnect between the company’s executives and investors. StumbleUpon has only raised a single seed round of financing - $1.5 million - and angel investors often informally shop a company, with or without the company’s permission, in the hope of an early cash out.
Whatever is going on, StumbleUpon certainly isn’t stumbling in its growth. It is now a significant source of traffic for many startups (an entrepreneur recently told me that 15% of his traffic last week came from StumbleUpon). Garret told me today that the company has 1.5 million registered users and an average of 3.5 million page views per day. They expect to be cash flow positive within the next few months.
Our previous StumbleUpon coverage is here.
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I manage several large sites with total combined userbase of around 500k, with something like 25m monthly pageviews. Stumble Upon is the only bookmarking or social site which drives traffic to those sites. It shows up more often then MySpace!
ok…we will give you credit if it was acquired.
Now, how about some good content instead?
Stumbleupon accounts for 35% of traffic to newreddignet.com and 41% to getyourblogread.com
It definitely brings me lots of visitors!
I think this is the most powerful tool I’ve seen on here in while. Ted are you using any promotional tools to drive traffic from myspace?
Stumbleupon certainly drives traffic to our website (www.koral.com); however, the conversion rate to actual trial customers is 0.91% versus 7-12.5% for most of our other referring sources. So we’re grateful for the brand awareness it creates but if people “stumble upon” your website that doesn’t mean that you are necessarily generating high quality leads. I think people interested in a topic (content management in our case) that self select themselves are clearly more valuable that “lurkers.”
How does one go about adding their website to SU?
i hope it doesn’t get bought; i like it.
Stumble Upon brought me 2500 visitors in 1 day at the pic when I registered my website http://www.surfons.com
Actually this webiste is so efficient and easy to use that it was clear it was going to be sold soon..
I put an article in french about this note: http://www.vincentabry.com/200.....0-millions
I use SU and find it great.. but how exactly do they make money?!
You can buy additionnal services.. I bought a Group for 20$ per year
Ditto Mark, lots of visitors, no conversions. May not matter if all you care about is visitors not $$$
wow, this is awesome you guys! thanks for posting feedback about it!
VCs wanna save money? Pay me $1 million and I’ll make you a way better stumbleupon. Then spend $48 million on marketing. In the end, you’ll saved $1 million!
They definitely shouldn’t sell out. I think there’s a real possibility they’ll stumble upon a bigger offer than $50 million.
We are getting quite a big number of hits from SU, but less than 0.2% from them are actually going beyond the first page.
So it’s very good load generator for your web site (if you want to test if your infrastructure is scalable), but I don’t see any real impact on our business (1K hits from TechCrunch give us more than 100K hits from SU)
Lenkov
SiteKreator
I agree with others here … we get ~100 hits per day from SU (our silly little humor site only gets 1K hits, so this isn’t bad), but 99%+ of the SU visitors stay for under 30 seconds. Are there other features of SU other than it’s random page stumble toolbar? If not, how could this possibly warrant $50 Million?
So if SU generates lots of visitors but only a few “serious leads”, then that’s still pretty good since after all it’s a free service.
Can’t see how this would warrant a price of $50M though.
Our web2.0 startup gets more traffic from stumbleupon than other bookmarking sites. google and SU are the two main drivers of traffic to pxn8.com .
It’s important to understand how StumbleUpon hits are glorified banner impressions (full-screen impressions), not really visits. One SU user can hit hundreds of sites very quickly without actually considering them.
Showing up as top referrals in lots of stats seem to be their (smart) custom promotional strategy.
I have just spent $400 in traffic from stumbleupon ($0.05 a “visitor”) in no time so I guess it generates some cash.
I think their visit/impression is worth something less, say 1-2 cents instead of 5.
This is very interesting. Streampad has seen referrals from StumbleUpon increase greatly in the past three days. The pageviews are much lower than average as are the conversions. I wonder if StumbleUpon “tweaked” something in an attempt to drive up referrals?
It is now a significant source of traffic for many startups (an entrepreneur recently told me that 15% of his traffic last week came from StumbleUpon)
At What Should I Read Next? almost 10% of our traffic over the last three months has come from StumbleUpon, too.
It’s true that SU visitors have much, much lower conversion rates then other visitors, because they are totally unqualified visitors. It actually reminds me of the early days of the web when people would often just visit anything and everything, even if they had no intention of actually using the service or getting more involved.
I posted that not to say that SU is good for business, but just to show that they are a force in web traffic, which is something you can’t deny. The value for investors is not in the traffic they deliver to other sites, but the control they have over people who like to surf the web. You can almost consider them like a browser company.
I had never heard of this site until reading the story. After visiting the site, I bet Google could throw up a copy of this site, intergrate it within their google answers, add in a review system and have the same thing. Of course, on the other hand, what’s $50 million in aquistion costs to some of the big players.
I herd the Developer say it was all Hog Wash
StumbleUpon is one of those wickedly ingenius ideas. If they were shopping at $50 million and I had that sort of cash, I would snap them up in an instant. I think Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or any major search player would be very wise to snap them up and utilize them in their ranking algorithms. Though, eventually StumbleUpon may suffer the same sort of problems as Digg does with “group voting.”
SU is more of a social community than anything else. The drama that goes on in there is unbelievable. Cliques and cults and god knows what else. “Love” affairs, ludicrous flame wars and “hate” campaigns, hacking, spamming… People belong to SU for the social connection, NOT for the websites. Those are basically irrelevant to most users of SU.
BS to KMD
BTW
They are in talks with Google see noheat.com. No mystery.
Well SU been a member for 2 yrs and YES what drama!Management is awful they never fix things the ratings of blogs are a sad joke wrong X ratings are very common there!I hope someone with business sense buys it!CH the mod of most the forums is a huge jerk,is never nice but they wont get rid of him,no people skills at all!Bans for no reason and is hide thread crazy on a power trip.The stumbling of sites and wishing for better owners is all that keeps me there.