Social Bookmarking Revival as StumbleUpon Lands $17M in Series B Funding
StumbleUpon is continuing its rise back to the top of its social media game, with a hefty round of funding. Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo Ventures will fund the social bookmarking site with $17 million in a series B round, after having received $1.5 million in angel funding in 2005. StumbleUpon currently has 14 million registered users and makes 800 million content recommendation per month. Since launching its iPhone and Android apps in August 2010, StumbleUpon exceeded one million installs of these apps.
“StumbleUpon continues to grow quickly and deliver on its ambitious goal of powering personalized content discovery across all media and platforms,” said Sameer Gandhi, Partner, Accel Partners. “Content discovery is a significant opportunity, and we are excited to continue to support the leading company in the space.”
StumbleUpon has also focused on online video, regarding this sector as a saving grace in their attempt to regain relevance. The StumbleUpon Video will feature a personalized approached based on the user’s assessment of each video – the thumbs up/thumb down buttons and will cover videos from YouTube, Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Hulu, TED and so on.
During the first month of 2011 StumbleUpon had 500 million hits and doubled its traffic in 6 months time, whereas competitor Reddit had over 1 billion hits in the same month. Reddit gained a massive number of users after Digg’s unwise makeover, decided by founder Kevin Rose in August 2010, which resulted in his resignation from the CEO position and a layoff of 37 percent of Digg’s staff. One of the measures later taken was removing the RSS submitted stories feature by which stories from the Reddit publisher account on Digg were sent to the Digg front page in an act of rebellion against the above-mentioned makeover in August 2010.
In all, StumbleUpon’s funding notes a marked return of various social media services that had been all but forgotten after the web 2.0 era faded into the real-time race. With the market settling and social media remaining a foundation for modern communication, StumbleUpon and others are taking advantage of new platform approaches and sharing techniques in order to revive their market power.
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