Ever since StumbleUpon spun itself off from eBay last April, it’s been reinventing itself at a rapid pace. In June, it launched Su.pr, its own URL shortening service, but that was just an interesting new product. Today, it is starting to roll out a major redesign that recasts the service as a social search engine “somewhere between a Twitter and Google,” says founder Garrett Camp.

About 8 million people a month use StumbleUpon, says Camp, to bookmark and share the best sites on the Web. More than 35 million Web pages have been stumbled, and now the company has indexed them all to make them more searchable. The homepage has also been simplified to show you a stream of pages recently stumbled by people you know. New StumbleUpon users will see the redesign immediately, while existing users can switch by clicking here.

Traditionally, people went to StumbleUpon to randomly flip through interesting pages, but now it works more like a proper search engine. Except that it only returns pages already deemed to be worthy by the StumbleUpon community, and then within those results it shows you the pages that only people you subscribe to have Stumbled, rated, or reviewed. In that sense, it is like Yahoo’s now-defunct MyWeb experiment (but with actual users).

You can sort results by everyone, just your friends, or just your own Stumbles. And the new Discover tab lets you sort by most recent stumbles from your friends, top rated stumbles, most shared, or by topic. “It is halfway between search and discovery,” says Camp. “It is not as comprehensive as Google and not as realtime as Twitter.” The idea, rather, is to add a social layer to search without all the noise you get on Twitter.

StumbleUpon will also be releasing a new version of its toolbar later this week, which will add these social search features, as well as the ability to share links on Facebook and Twitter (using a Su.pr URL). Also the toolbar, like before, shows a little StumbleUpon icon on Google search results next to links that have been Stumbled. But it will support new sites including, Bing, CNN.com, Yahoo News, and the New York Times.

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What is it with all the toolbar copycat craziness lately. First, there was Digg going after StumbleUpon with the Diggbar. Then StumbleUpon, which already had a toolbar, introduced a new toolbar/URL shortening service called Su.pr.

Now, micro-blogging service Tumblr is getting in on the act with its own toolbar which it is calling TumbleUpon. Could they try to be more blatant in ripping off StumbleUpon? The toolbar has a random Stumble-like shuffle button which randomly takes you through different Tumblogs in a similar way that StumbleUpon’s toolbars do. On the right there is a heart button if you want to “like” a page, a reblog button and a button that takes you to your own Tumblr dashboard.

StumbleUpon’s Su.pr toolbar, in comparison, also has a random shuffle button for discovering pages Websites other people have Stumbled, and a “like” button. But Su.pr is a URL shortener with powerful analytics on the backend, while TumbleUpon is not. It is just a discovery tool which surfaces other Tumblogs of people who have overlapping “likes.”

So is this a joke? Yes, and no. Tumblr founder David Karp tells us:

It was really an experiment to see how a tool like StumbleUpon would work for Tumblr content. Based on the feedback, it seems to be doing a pretty good job. We really like that it’s the first Tumblr discovery tool that shows off all of the pretty user created themes while exploring content. . . .

We might wind up changing the name when we start promoting it in the Dashboard

In a blog post today, Karp also shares some growth stats. He claims that in July, 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million impressions, 650,000 new posts per day, and 5,000 new users per day.

Tumblr is definitely growing, but comScore estimates a much smaller number of users: only 3.9 million uniques worldwide in June, 2009 and 68 million pageviews. That is a 3X increase in unique visitors over a year ago and a 12X increase in pageviews, but a far cry from the numbers Karp is putting out.

I asked Karp what could explain this disparity. He pointed out that 15 percent of Tumblr’s blogs are on custom domains, and that the 50 million number is for visitors per Google Analytics. The same person can be a visitor more than once. Google counts 20 million unique visitors, and Quantcast counts 13 million worldwide. The site is verified by Quantcast, so I’d go with that number. Any way you count it, though, the service is showing strong growth.

But really, TumbleUpon?

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Su.pr, StumbleUpon’s URL shortening service, has come out of closed beta. StumbleUpon, which was recently freed from eBay’s clutches, tossed its hat in the URL shortening ring earlier this year. We first heard about Su.pr in March when StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp Tweeted about it. Su.pr, like other shortening tools, lets you shorten a URL and share it across Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.

The nifty part of Su.pr’s service is that it gives you a dashboard to help you keep track of how many times your su.pr links have been shared, across which services. You can see how many times each link has been clicked on and retweeted (along with the number of followers for each retweeter). It also lets you schedule shared links across those services for any time you want.

Su.pr’s analytics are similar to those that fellow UR shortening service bit.ly provides, except that Su.pr is connected to website discovery service Stumbleupon, which gives each link an extra distribution push. Links can be voted upon by the StumbleUpon community (which the platform estimates as 8 million users), and if it becomes popular the link can become viral. For StumbleUpon, Su.pr is a way to seed the service with links people are already pushing out to their real-time streams.

Of course, the URL shortening arena is almost over saturated with services. There’s the leader of the pack, bit.ly, TinyURL, Digg’s controversial Diggbar (which helped lift unique visitors by 20 percent), Awe.sm, Un.hub, Link.by, Owl.ly, Post.ly and many more. But Su.pr’s analytics could help the service to be a serious competitor in the URL shortening wars.

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What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.

The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck.

It feels like Coverflow on Apple’s iTunes, except that you navigate through the deck front to back instead of side to side. It also reminds me of the deck metaphor on the new Palm Pre. I can definitely see this as a good UI for mobile apps as well where screen size is more constrained. Don’t worry, though, the regular list view is still an option.

My only problem with the visualization is that it takes a while to load (Flash, why do you torture me?). But other than that, it makes sifting through each feed seem more like channel-surfing in the way that SearchMe does for search results and music search or StumbleVideo does for Web videos. But there must be a better way to wade through the stream. What is it?

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Any self-respecting Website these days has its own URL shortening service for easy syndication of links across Twitter, Facebook and other status streams. There are services such as bit.ly and TinyURL. Digg has its controversial Diggbar (which helped lift unique visitors by 20 percent). Hell, even we use our own custom short URL domain (tcrn.ch) via Awe.sm.

Now, StumbleUpon, which was recently freed from eBay’s clutches, is rolling out its own URL shortening service, Su.pr. It is in closed beta, but we have 250 invites for the first TechCrunch readers to enter the promotional code: suprtc

We first caught wind of Su.pr back in March when StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp appropriately enough Tweeted about it. Su.pr lets you shorten a URL and share it across Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon. What’s more, it gives you a dashboard to help you keep track of how many times your su.pr links have been shared, across which services. You can see how many times each link has been clicked on and retweeted (along with the number of followers for each retweeter). It also lets you schedule shared links across those services for any time you want.

The analytics are key. They are similar to what you’d find using bit.ly, except that Su.pr is plugged into Stumbleupon, which gives each link an extra distribution push. Each link can then be voted upon by the StumbleUpon community, and if it becomes popular, it can take on a new life. For StumbleUpon, it is a way to seed the service with links people are already pushing out to their real-time streams. StumbleUpon links take longer to gain momentum, so one benefit is that it could extend the life of good links.

Camp calls them “Su.pr links” because they take wrap the pages with a toolbar up top that entices people to vote the page up or down and Stumble to another page. “We are trying to give people a stumble experience through syndicating links,” he explains. Right now, however, Su.pr is using frames like the Diggbar, instead of redirecting straight to the underlying page. However, Camp says by the time Su.pr launches in public, websites will have the option to register with the service and host the toolbar themselves on their own URL (using a line of Javascript). His team is also developing custom short URLs for large sites which can tap into the same analytics backend (and further help push more content into StumbleUpon).

There is definitely a need for tools like these because Website publishers want to know not just what is happening on their sites, but what is happening to their links across the Web. But will it be enough to reignite interest in Stumbleupon, which languished under eBay’s ownership?

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New investors Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital joined StumbleUpon founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith in purchasing the company back from eBay. Outside investors put in 85% or so of the $29 million, we’ve been told, with Camp and Smith making up the rest.

eBay was paid $25 million in cash for StumbleUpon and retains a 10% interest in the spun off entity. $4 million remains in the company to fund operations.

StumbleUpon’s revenues are estimated at $5 million – $10 million annually.

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You’d think that the founders (Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Justin LeFrance) would be quite content to go into semi-hibernation at eBay and contemplate their vacation homes for years to come. But like so many already-wealthy entrepreneurs, some fire kept driving at them to keep themselves challenged. It may be the deep rooted insecurity that leads most entrepreneurs to try to build companies in the first place – getting bought doesn’t necessarily give them the self confidence they thought it would. Or it may be a simpler explanation – the certain knowledge that StumbleUpon hasn’t yet become whatever it is eventually destined to be.

So when the opportunity came for the founders to buy the company back from eBay and start over, they took it. The struggling eBay had been looking to sell off StumbleUpon for months, even hiring investment bank Deutsche Bank to help them get back their $75 million, but there were no takers. That left the door open for the founders to buy it back themselves.

What’s next for StumbleUpon? Presumably Ebay got some cash in the deal from the injection of capital from the founders, Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. Some of that new cash must also be used to capitalize the newly independent company. StumbleUpon has a revenue model that forces ads on users every few pages they view at a flat rate of $0.05 per ad, and since they have 100% click-throughs on the forced feeding of these ads, there is presumably some very real revenue flowing to the company. StumbleUpon doesn’t cost much to run. Remember that they only raised $1.5 million before the original sale, so keeping the lights on shouldn’t be a problem, even if growth continues to stagnate (in fact, Comscore shows StumbleUpon with the same number of unique monthly visitors today, 1.5 million, that they had two years ago).

Growth will almost certainly kick in again now that the team has a renewed incentive to better the product and compete. StumbleUpon had terrific growth prior to the eBay sale (see chart); my guess is they’ll get healthy again soon.

What I love about the spin off is that the company is now able to allocate resources properly, without having to deal with the bureaucracy of a huge public company parent to slow things down and drain off people and cash. There have been other examples of sales followed by buybacks in the past. My favorite is Webshots, which was sold to Excite for $82.5 million in 1999, bought back by the founders for $2.5 million in 2001, and then resold to CNET for $71 million in 2004 (CNET later sold it to American Greetings for $45 million in 2007). Listen to the first few minutes of this podcast with Narendra Rocherolle, one of the founders, for that story.

It would have been different if eBay had integrated StumbleUpon into its core business somewhere along the way, or synergies between the products allowed StumbleUpon to shine in a way that it never could as an independent company (like YouTube has at Google). But none of that happened. So by far the best thing was for the company to once again fight it out as a small, nimble startup. Resources have been allocated efficiently, and the startup ecosystem is healthier for it.

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The new company is led by co-founder Garrett Camp, who now steps into the CEO role. Co-founder Geoff Smith also joins Camp in returning to lead the company, but in an unannounced role. The company is backed by Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. David Hornik from August Capital and Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners join the board.

“The company is amply funded. And everyone is glad that the company is away from eBay,” a source tells us. eBay had previously been looking for a minimum of $75 million for StumbleUpon. It’s likely the spin out valuation was significantly lower than that. Our understanding is that Sequoia placed a competing bid, but Camp and investor Ram Shriram went with Accel and August Capital.

It’s not clear if eBay maintains a stake in the company, but that seems fairly unlikely. Really, its interest in the company never made a lot of sense in the first place. StumbleUpon is a way for users to find interesting sites throughout the web. While eBay certainly could have used that technology to find interesting things on its site, it never did that.

And StumbleUpon’s traffic has been falling in the past year. In February 2008, the site was at 2.6 million unique visitors. But in February 2009 that number was down to 1.4 million, according to comScore (chart below). Of course, traffic numbers are a bit odd to use with StumbleUpon because the service doesn’t require that you visit its actual site if you use its popular web browser toolbar. But last year it launched a frame-based toolbar that kept you on the StumbleUpon domain in a way similar to what Digg is now doing with the DiggBar.

Similarly, just as the DiggBar allows users to shorten URLs, StumbleUpon had been working on a way to do this using the Su.pr domain.

This news comes at a time when reports are circulating that VoIP company Skype’s founders are also trying to rip it back out of the hands of eBay. That may be a bit more complicated as eBay bought Skype for a cool $3.1 billion back in 2005.

In its former life as a startup, StumbleUpon raised a $1.5 million seed round of funding in December of 2005.

Below find the press release:

StumbleUpon Goes Independent; Backed by Founders and New Investors

April 13, 2009 – StumbleUpon, the best way to discover new content on the Internet, today announced that after nearly 2 years as a subsidiary of eBay Inc., it has returned to the ranks of an investor-backed startup.  StumbleUpon is now backed by the original company founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, as well as a number of well-known investors including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital.  Camp takes on the role of CEO of StumbleUpon.
“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance.  However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp. “This change makes it possible for StumbleUpon to continue to innovate and focus on becoming the Web’s largest recommendation service.”

“StumbleUpon helps users discover the best of the web – it’s a way to find interesting content you wouldn’t think to search for,” said Shriram. “StumbleUpon’s personalized recommendation engine brings serendipity back to websurfing, and lets users sift through socially-endorsed content with a single click.”

StumbleUpon will remain focused on helping people discover interesting content by increasing the accessibility of the StumbleUpon service and the quality of recommendations.  In addition, StumbleUpon has plans for several new products and features to be released in the upcoming months.

About StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon discovers Web sites based on your interests, learns what you like, and brings you more.  With more than 7.4 million users and 425 million recommendations per month, StumbleUpon is the leading way to discover great content on the Internet.  More than 20,000 advertisers are using StumbleUpon to promote products and services.  Founded in 2001, StumbleUpon is based in San Francisco and backed by the same investors as Google and Facebook.  For more information, visit www.StumbleUpon.com.

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StumbleUpon is preparing to launch a shortURL service (a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs, like TinyURL or Bit.ly) in the next couple of weeks called su.pr.

Founder Garrett Camp announced the new service on Twitter without any description of what it might be on March 3. In an email exchange he says it will be a shortURL service to share StumbleUpon links on sites like Twitter and Facebook and that it will be launched in a week or two. The site currently redirects to StumbleUpon.

Digg is planning its own similar service, which we covered late last month.

Digg’s service will show additional information, like total traffic to the link, in a Digg “toolbar” wrapper, and users can easily create links by simply adding digg.com/ before any URL (the short URL will then be created and shown. I don’t have any information on exactly what StumbleUpon is planning, but it’s a safe guess it’ll have similar features, and it may actually launch before Digg.

The benefit to StumbleUpon and Digg to these services is traffic when people click on the short URLs. People add a lot on links on Twitter posts but space constraints (140 characters per post) require short URLs.

Thanks Paul for the tip.

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A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.

Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality.

Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. This technique works for pages that have never been Dugg as well. I could see this feature eventually showing up as part of a browser add-on so that Digg URL’s could be created with one click.

The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. Users can click on an X to get rid of the toolbar frame and be taken to the original page, and the original page gets the hit as well. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). But by running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on.

It is amazing that Twitter has single-handedly created this need for shortened URLs and that a relatively large player like Digg now wants a piece of that market.

Click on the screenshot below for a larger image:

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Last time we wrote about Mixx, they were touting healthy traffic numbers and boasting the fact that Hitwise report suggested that its users are more mainstream than those of their main competitor Digg. Today, the company says its visitor numbers have increased to about 7 million per month (citing January figures), which is up from 5.8 million in October 2008.

Meanwhile, all the big social news and discovery services are showing healthy growth, and Mixx appears to still play in the minor leagues. Take a look at this snapshot from Compete, for example, which show Digg is thriving and Reddit is steadily outpacing Mixx. Google Trends paints a slightly different picture but still pegs Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon to be more popular than Mixx. Quantcast, finally, says Mixx receives about a 1/5 of the amount of visitors Digg does.

For the sake of comparison: Mixx raised $3.5 million in funding so far, while Digg pocketed $40 million to date.

Mixx is launching a new website today to better serve their existing users, which they claim have provided all the feedback that was used to put together the revamped web presence.

We’ll let you be the judge (more info here):

Old Mixx

New Mixx

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In other Mozilla news, Firefox and other Mozilla products hit a major milestone today with the one billionth download of add-on software for the browser. That feat took three and half years.

Many of those downloads are never used more than once or twice, of course. But there is no doubt about it that Firefox is major software platform. Just look at StumbleUpon, it was built on top of Firefox.

What is atop the current list of most popular add-ons? Adblock Plus, followed by a bunch of download tools. And let’s not forget Greasemonkey at No. 9, which is it’s own Web development platform.

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StumbleUpon’s 2008 revenues are estimated to be $6 million or so.

eBay has denied the sale attempt, but there are too many people who’ve seen the deal book and have heard Deutsche Bank’s pitch. The big question is, will it sell?

As we wrote in our last post, StumbleUpon’s traffic has stagnated or declined, depending on which analytics service you look at. StumbleUpon says usage is growing at a fast clip, despite website traffic, because most users never visit the site after downloading the toolbar.

Ok, but StumbleUpon didn’t mind pointing to usage stats in the early days before the sale to eBay. And the stats are likely irrelevant anyway, since StumbleUpon recently deprioritized the toolbar to let users “stumble” to new sites directly from the website. Expect traffic to grow quickly with that change.

Update: Yet another source who’s been pitched says Ebay may consider a $50 million deal. I’m starting to feel like I should get a finders fee.

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Israeli blogger Tal Siach, one of the authors of the Walyou blog, seems to be one of the few people who can actually access the new, toolbar-free version of StumbleUpon. The new version was set to launch to everyone on Wednesday, but so far everyone I’ve spoken with is still on the old design, which requires the downloaded toolbar to function properly. Lucky for us, though, Tal is in, and wrote a review of what he sees.

One nice trick: if you want to see the new javascript toolbar in action, click here and it should work. You can stumble on to other pages from there.

Tal’s post is below:

I use StumbleUpon on a daily basis, so I was surprised to see a brand new design and face on one of my favorite social networking sites. It also came as a shock since TechCrunch recently reported that Ebay showed their interest in selling StumbleUpon.

Since it came so sudden, I spoke to some of my friends and realized they do not see the same new face that I see on my monitor. I assume that StumbleUpon must have wanted to slowly bring it up on various users, test it, get feedback and then provide it to their massive community. I am extremely fortunate and lucky to be one of the selected to test the design.

I am still not sure what all the changes are, but here are a few I noticed immediately:

New Homepage Look

Stars for each Discovery (Submission)

Every time a story has been discovered it ranks on a 0-5 stars scale which makes up the score of the Submission. This of course will be based by the number of thumbs up, reviews, domain popularity and several additional parameters within the StumbleUpon algorithm. You can get some additional insights on the latter in Tim Nash excellent post – Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers (http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2007/09/19/stumbleupon-mathematics-for-stumblers/)

In the second screenshot below, different scales are presented, and the number of reviews do not decide the popularity alone. You can see that the last submission received 24 reviews yet still did not rank well and has 0 stars.

This refers per submission and doesn’t necessarily say anything about the domain itself; the same site can have additional posts with varying stars rank.

Discovery Page

Seems like StumbleUpon gives a Featured Icon to any post that has been discovered. At first glance I thought it is a mark to show if posts have become hot or not; however after a second look I am fairly certain its just a mark to show the URL has been discovered, and the number of stars are the real indication whether a post went popular or not in the StumbleUpon algorithm.

I just recently stumbled an interesting post about Kwiclick.com via Orli Yakuel’s blog.

Below you can see the discovery page of that submission with the Featured Icon and the user who discovered on the right. Underneath that Stumbler who discovered it you will see others who liked it. Since I just discovered it, it is only me .

After people review the post they can add the specific site as a place for cool resources and with that get more similar stuff they like in the future – improving the recommendation engine.
For example, I clicked the question above, and marked Go2web20.net as a source I would like to see more from the site. The picture below shows the changes on what happens where the “do you like this page from…” is.

Featured Posts in Categories

In the new StumbleUpon design, the Categories are listed on top, while the ranked posts based on stars rating and enough algorithm popularity are listed within their category.

In this screenshot example below: all the technology related posts that were featured have subcategories like Electronics inside technology. The items listed here aren’t necessarily new ones, and you can find links that are rather old but with good rankings from the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon users can now check the selected articles, pictures and videos that the community marked as Popular. By placing the categories on top of the page, StumbleUpon encourages users not only to stumble random stuff directly from the toolbar but actually go and choose a list of popular stumbles themselves of what they would like to read, see or watch.

If you ask me, maybe StumbleUpon wants to encourage users to use the site more like other social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit or Mixx.

Transparency Ranking in your Subscriptions and Blog Page

From now on, you and others can see the number of stars on your own discoveries and vice versa. Moreover, you can see the star action in actual sections as well, so it may encourage you to check additional stumbles.

Well, these are some of the changes I saw so far and there are probably others. With time, additional information will be revealed, and as I mentioned not all users can see the new design in the beginning. I am not sure what the reason is, but it is probably to beta test its effectiveness first.

Another addition we may see is what Tec Crunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/30/stumbleupon-set-for-resurgence-with-web-toolbar-partner-program/) mentioned of StumbleUpon’s desire to develop their toolbar for the web instead of an install toolbar. They must be missing a lot of users by requiring the installation, which many want to avoid.

My own new design assumptions have not been confirmed by the StumbleUpon staff and are my own opinions and beliefs. If there is something you have found out which I have missed, I would love if you would share in the comments for all the readers to read as well.

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Recommendation engine StumbleUpon has been facing some tough times lately: earlier this month we reported that eBay was looking to sell the startup less than 18 months after acquiring it (the company refuses to comment). And its traffic has been showing signs of stagnation (though the number of registered users to steadily rise). But tonight, the site is launching a new feature that may very well turn things around: a long awaited install-free web toolbar.

Update: CEO Garrett Camp says that usage of the service isn’t stagnating – the unique views have leveled off because users tend to Stumble without returning to the site’s homepage, so their hits aren’t recorded.

StumbleUpon has long been hindered by the fact that it requires a browser plugin that users have to download and install. Such plugins create a large barrier to entry, as they are time consuming and tend to be associated with malware. These problems are magnified by the fact that StumbleUpon’s purpose isn’t immediately obvious – many users have to actually try it out before they understand what it does (for the uninitiated, it uses an algorithm based on your preferences and other users to direct you to websites that you’ll find interesting).

The service’s web-based browser toolbar, which launches tonight, overcomes these issues by replicating much of StumbleUpon’s functionality without requiring an install. To access the web toolbar, you simply visit the revamped StumbleUpon homepage and click on one of the recommended links. The toolbar sits conveniently at the top of the browser window in its own frame, with a prominent “Stumble” button sitting aside a set of stars for rating the sites you come across. The service uses cookies to persistently keep track of your actions across multiple sessions (you can import this data to the toolbar if you ever choose to install it).

To coincide with tonight’s announcement, StumbleUpon is introducing a partner program for sites that will take advantage of the web toolbar. At launch, The Huffington Post and HowStuffWorks will include widgets alongside their articles that will allow users to launch a StumbleUpon browser toolbar that is restricted to their sites (a toolbar launched at Huffington Post would only stumble across Huffington Post articles). The program will likely be a big success, as it allows partner sites to increase their page views by introducing users to new content, while helping StumbleUpon reach a broader audience.

StumbleUpon will still have some obstacles to overcome – the purpose of the web toolbar won’t be immediately obvious to new users, especially those who reach it from partner sites like The Huffington Post. But the burden of the browser plugin has finally been lifted, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these additions prompt impressive growth numbers in the coming months.

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eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to find the right buyer, says our source, but the asking price is unknown. It’s not certain that eBay will be able to sell it for the price they paid – In July StumbleUpon had 1.3 million worldwide visitors and 25 million page views. Twelve months earlier the service attracted 4.4 million visitors and 31 million page views (Comscore). Google trends shows stagnation over the last year as well.

Registered users have continued to rise steadily, however. The service had 5 million in April 2008. As of this evening, the site shows 6,003,763, a 20% rise in less than 5 months.

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Sometime today, StumbleUpon will register its five millionth user. (At the time of this writing, it is at 4,994,826 registered users). That number is kind of meaningless, though, because it counts anyone who has ever registered for the Website-rating and discovery service, and who may no longer use it. StumbleUpon, which is part of eBay, does not disclose how many active users it has.

But it did provide me with the nifty little graph above which shows how many times users actually “stumble” something on the Web. (When you like a site or a video you can stumble it by giving it a thumbs up—the more stumbles a page gets, the higher it ranks when others are looking for similar pages). The service is about to collect its five billionth stumble within the next 30 days. Users have already stumbled more than one billion times so far this year. Stumbling activity was up 160 percent during the first quarter of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007 (with 974 million stumbles versus 375 million).

Meanwhile, traffic to the site has been steadily climbing back since taking a huge dive last fall. According to comScore, unique visitors worldwide dropped from 4.8 million last October to 1.8 million in December, but came back up to 3.2 million in March. Many active users never go to the site, and just stumble from their browser toolbar. But as the quality of StumbleUpon’s user-selected index improves, it should attract more casual visitors to its site.

Most people think of StumbleUpon as a socially-powered discovery engine rather than a search engine, but personal discovery and search may be colliding. During a recent speech at the Next Web conference, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp noted:

Personalized search is just getting started. I think personalized crawling will start too. Crawlers now are trying to create the biggest map of the web, but implicit filtering and intelligent agents—that is where search and discovery will meet. My query log isn’t actually representative of what I want on the Web.

I like that idea of a personalized Web crawler that indexes only the part of the Web deemed to be most relevant to you and people you know or who share the same interests. Stumbleupon already identifies other users related to you who are drawn to similar Websites, and is building a general index of high-quality sites. The more stumbles it collects, the better its index, and the easier it will be to personalize that down the road. With the number of stumbles rapidly accelerating, the next five billion should take only about another year to gather.

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Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel.

TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot.

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Unlike Pay Per Post, the company doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to spin their business into something socially acceptable. People pay them to pollute big social sites and get traffic, and they’re ok with being slammed for that. As long as they make money. The whole operation is complete with founder pseudonyms (Ragnar Danneskjold, Vasili Taleniekov), proxied whois records, and a clandestine PayPal Account.

The service is bringing in the new year with a new pricing model. In ‘08, Diggs and Stumbles will be increased to $2 per vote. Users will be paid $1 for their votes. You can also earn 20% of the earnings of any friends you refer, and 10% of the cost of advertisements from any advertisers you refer.

And they are also expanding into YouTube.

“Crowd Hacking”

Getting articles on the front page of Digg has gotten harder as the community has grown, however. Digg’s algorithms have become more resistant to the same groups of users voting stories, so getting even 50 Diggs is no guarantee of success. Although, S&P claims 9,000 users internationally which they can spread the votes amongst. They also ask users to vote for a random group of other stories to obfuscate their operation. S&P previously claimed a 2/3 success rate.

Assuming it takes 100 votes to ensure a story hits the front page and that it will pull in 10,000 visitors, you’d be paying $0.02 per visitor; a rate comparable to low end remnant advertising. Articles could be much more effective, or not hit at all.

Next Stop, YouTube

While they have not yet revealed how they plan on subverting and profiting from YouTube, we can take some guesses based on Dan Ackerman’s infamous guest post on the subject. Dan’s viral suggestions included email lists, comments, views, blog embeds, and ratings. I imagine S&P’s strategy will center around paying their users to boost each of these.

However, getting big on YouTube is significantly harder than Digg or StumbleUpon. Front page featured videos are chosen by YouTube itself and pushing a video up the ranks in terms of views requires tens of thousands, not hundreds of user actions. I can only imagine their plans include outright view fraud to make the video “go viral”.

Still, I’m left wondering how much all this trouble is worth to advertisers. YouTube videos don’t easily drive traffic to a website, making them harder to audit than referral links from Digg or StumbleUpon. Also, at the end of the day you don’t know how much these services actually contributed to the success of your content. Any statements about the success of these operations come from their founders and are shrouded in promises of secrecy for their clients.

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“We are doing social search,” says StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp, “but instead of creating a completely new search engine where you have to change your behavior, you can use the same search engine you use now.” As long as you have the toolbar, StumbleUpon’s ratings get layered on top of other search engine results and Web pages. “We should be able to do this for any site on the Web,” adds Camp.

So why isn’t eBay, which now owns StumbleUpon, one of the sites? The short answer, says Camp, is that it was easier to turn on the other sites first. Making the feature work on eBay would require some custom work, not to mention the temporal nature of its auctions throws a few wrenches into the equation. What’s the point of looking at highly rated auctions that have already expired?

Camp seems more excited about future integration with Skype, which is another eBay-owned client download that sits on many more desktops than StumbleUpon. People who use StumbleUpon like to share their stumbles with their friends, and Skype could offer an instant way to do that. This could be particularly appealing for sharing videos, photos, or music found on the Web. “Skype has that streaming technology that will enable sharing not just of a link,”notes Camp, “but of anything.” This isn’t an announcement, he’s just thinking out loud.

But another added benefit of doing something with Skype would be the ability to import your Skype contacts into StumbleUpon so that you can automatically start sharing with any Skype contact who also happen to be a Stumbler. (Incidentally, you can already do this with Stumbleupon and Facebook, which suggests a partial hack around the general prohibition against importing your friends list into other applications).

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Although you can imagine “StumbleUpon Shopping” coming soon, eBay is leaving the company alone and taking a wait-and-see approach. The corporation will remain completely intact, except for the addition of eBay’s Michael Buhr, who will serve as general manager for the product.

Throughout 2007, StumbleUpon has seen tremendous growth. They currently have over 2.3 million registered users, serve 5 million daily recommendations, and are experiencing a 150% year over year growth rate. Here’s a quick look at their latest stats from comScore:

More crunch: click here for the StumbleUpon fact sheet.

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I don’t know if the price will be disclosed, or if the rumors of $75 million are roughly correct.

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The high flying startup has been rumored to be in acquisition talks since November .

The Wall Street Journal report quotes an insider saying that no final agreement has been reached and that talks could still fail.

The StumbleUpon had 2.1 million users as of April, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are “stumbled” daily.

The purchase price of $75 million will make a tidy profit for investors who include Ram Shriram and Lotus Development Corp. founder Mitch Kapor: StumbleUpon has only raised $1.5 million in a single round of seed financing previously.

The $75 million is on the high side of our initial range of $40-$75 million. Was there another bidder? Did Google and AOL stake a claim only to be trumped by eBay?

If the deal is finalized it’s an interesting move by eBay. Paypal was core to eBay’s Auction business. Skype could be justified as a tie into the Auction business as well. So where does StumbleUpon sit? People “stumbling” from site to site with a business model the revolves around selling page views seems like an odd fit. A sign that eBay is looking to expand into new markets perhaps? Time will tell.

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The plugin is available here. Click here to see a random TechCrunch post from the past, or use the icon in the far right area of the navigation bar above.

If StumbleUpon does decide to offer this functionality as a widget, we’d probably integrate it. The plugin Matt created doesn’t assign any value or ratings to posts. With StumbleUpon, it’s much more likely the random post would be interesting to the reader.

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It’s a cool way to find those YouTube videos or Onion articles that will appeal most to you. But I agree with Rafe Needleman – StumbleUpon should release this functionality through an API and let sites include a “Stumble” button. If the reader is a StumbleUpon user, it will take them to a page on the site that they’ll like. If they aren’t, it should take them to a random page on that site and can prompt them to become a StumbleUpon user to get more customized results.

Creating a link to take readers to a random post is a good idea and would only take a couple of minutes to code in WordPress (we’ll do it for fun this afternoon). If StumbleUpon gives away the functionality, my guess is a lot of sites would integrate it to increase page views.

Update: There’s now a Wordpress plugin to generate a random post redirect within the blog. We’ve integrated it. More here.

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