Talking Social Advertising with StumbleUpon

I fired some questions at StumbleUpon's VP of Business Development, John Bryan. We talked about StumbleUpon advertising, the future of social advertising and more. I even tried to get him to spill a few beans about eBay's interest in selling StumbleUpon. Here it goes...

Chris Crum: What is the benefit to an advertiser to spend money advertising with StumbleUpon as opposed to simply submitting their site like anyone else?

John Bryan: The two key benefits to submitting your page through JB: Giving our users the ability to vote an ad up or down means that good content gets seen more frequently and lower rated content gets seen less often.  StumbleUpon’s main focus is maintaining high-quality content on our site, including ads, for our users to enjoy. If an advertiser has a piece of high-quality content, uses appropriate targeting, and users like it, it has the opportunity to go viral and the views an advertiser buys have the opportunity to result in many, many subsequent views. For instance, one of our advertisers told us that their ad campaigns yielded four views for every one they bought. We hear similar such stories all the time and it is just another great example of the value that you can find with StumbleUpon advertising.

CC: What kind of targeting can you offer? You offer geo-targeting in addition to the standard user preferences, right?

JB: Yes, advertisers on StumbleUpon can choose to target their audiences by interest topic, geography, gender and age. Additionally, given the vast community we’ve built, we have an opportunity to provide a number of targeting suggestions beyond these basics and based on the patterns we see across our network.

CC: Based on the JB: Our advertisers have told us that StumbleUpon is one of the most effective tools in their arsenal to drive traffic to their sites. While we feel that StumbleUpon can complement your paid Search advertising, there are certain things that differentiate us from Search. StumbleUpon provides advertisers and brand builders with a highly effective tool with which they can reach their desired target market.

StumbleUpon is unique amongst web advertising platforms. On a daily basis, our users tell us what they are looking for and they trust us to help them discover the best of the Web. Just as we cut through the clutter of content on the Web for our users, we can give an advertiser access to a large community of pre-qualified users who have opted in to receive their content. You can think of it as “permission based marketing on steroids.” For example, every day we track our users across 511 individual content verticals ranging from Anime to Zoology.

Because our users rate every piece of content they like - and every piece they don’t - we can leverage their declared engagement to help advertisers effectively reach the right audience for their campaign. And because we have many millions of users participating in our ecosystem in a given month, we can leverage the patterns and trends that we see to help further the targeting and insights we provide to advertisers.


CC: There was talk a few months back that eBay might be looking to unload StumbleUpon. Is there anything with regards to that that you can tell me?

JB: We don’t comment on industry rumors but what I can say is that we operate as an independent business unit of eBay and continue to focus on moving the business forward and providing as much value as possible.

CC: Well, I tried. I'd like to thank Mr. Bryan for answering my questions.