Austin, Texas — Revelling the $17 million funding round announced recently, StumbleUpon lets people easily share their favorite websites, and helps millions of readers explore the Internet, generating some impressive traffic in the process. StumbleUpon, at the SXSW introduced a new ad platform over the traditional banner ads on the Internet for advertisers dubbed as “Paid Discovery” that promises 100% engagement.
The new offering, which the company refers to as “social media brand advertising program,” is an extension of its continuing paid placement system, and presents an engaged target audience directly to you–no clicking through ads or links. 100% engagement, 100% of the time.
Moreover, the new service for advertisers is bundled with enhanced analytics functionality, such as the ability to utilize a variety of targeting options, advanced reporting features and variable pricing and serving options.
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With the new Paid Discovery platform, StumbleUpon purportedly offer an advertising platform that targets exactly the right audience — the pot of gold at the end of the social media and display ad rainbow — and with a ballooning base of more than 14 million users, advertisers may be keen to follow the engine’s example.
StumbleUpon has been permitting advertisers purchase placement to have their sites displayed in front of its users for years, but the new paid discovery system adds new features previously unavailable to advertisers — the ability to reach customers though in-stream promotion of everything from entire web pages to mobile sites or videos.
Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO and co-founder explained: “Today’s display ads essentially miss what is critical for brands: integrating relevant sponsored content with the intended user experience.
“With Paid Discovery, advertisers and agencies can connect directly with customers interested in unerthing their products and harvest valuable insights into how their customers are engaging with them.”
In addition, the new service, which was developed from scratch, now has three price structure that will give prioritized viewing to advertisers: Light, Standard, and Premium. Light costs 5 cents per visitor, and is targeted by interest, location, and demographics. It consists basic reporting, and integration with Google Analytics.
Standard is priced at 10 cents per “engaged visitor”. It comprises of priority serving in content streams, the ability to target by interest, location, and demographics, as well as by device (web/mobile), reporting that includes site performance and visitor data, traffic analysis, and website quality score, and Google Analytics integration.
Lastly, Premium is bundled with guaranteed top serving priority in content streams, standard campaign targeting options, advanced reporting, integration with Google Analytics, and costs 25 cents per “engaged visitor”.
“Millions of influencers are adopting StumbleUpon to discover the best of the web and mobile,” the company says. “By hitting a button in their browsers or on their mobile device, StumbleUpon users are directed through a stream of sites that reflect their interests and that have been recommended by friends.”
StumbleUpon expects that this option to have a site included is valuable method of discovery, one that has integrity and trust generated by the brand StumbleUpon.
Furthermore, the company plans to help brands realize more about users and the way they engage, with the help of a variety of metrics such as age, gender, location, and more than 500 different topical interest areas, and the time users spend interacting with the brand’s content and the way they share it across StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and email.
In an interview this week with Media Beat, CEO Garrett Camp described the company’s new ad program:
“Paid Discovery is a way for anyone with interesting branded content to dispense it to StumbleUpon members. We have a community of 15 million people, they are stumbling, they are looking to find interesting stuff. Every time they click the ‘Stumble’ button, they say ‘I want to see something cool matched to my interests,'” Camp explained.
“If you possess something that you think may be appealing to our audiences, you can indeed become one of those stumbles. The way our system operates is that one in 20 stumbles will be a paid placement matched to your interests … Unlike a banner ad network, there is no click. It totally skips the click — it becomes the page you view in your stumble-stream.”
StumbleUpon is in a matchless position to offer interesting advertisements, given the very nature of its service — discovery. Now, it is up to the advertisers, however, to create ads that are engaging enough to keep audiences happy.
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