eBay's StumbleUpon Has New, Novel Contextual Advertising Scheme around Online Video

Click To Play

Last week I was on the MIT campus where I interviewed Garrett Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon, the San Francisco-based company that allows users to organize and recommend online videos.  The company was sold to eBay in June for $75 million. 

Garrett, 28, was honored by MIT's Technology Review as one of the one of the world's most accomplished innovators under 35.   

The company was covered in a big story in today's New York Times.

Garrett told me that not a lot has changed since the acquisition and that StumbleUpon still operates largely independently from eBay.

The company has recently introduced a novel advertising approach:  Advertisers can sign up to have a particular Web page "served" into the process of "stumbling."  Meaning, users who are looking for a topic and click a video to view will be shown a web page that matches the demographic and interests of the "stumbler."

Garrett explains that there are few of these pages served -- just about one in twenty "stumbles" find an inserted advertiser Web page.  We assume that the page loads for a limited time and then leads to the requested video.   

In our interview he also explains how the demographics of StumbleUpon are moving past the "early adopters." 

For background and a demonstration of StumbeUpon, check out my interview with Garrett from December.

Grab the embed code of this interview with Garrett Camp.

-- Andy Plesser