When I contacted Mike Mayzel, StumbleUpon’s director of communications, he said the layoffs were not the initial stages of a death spiral:

StumbleUpon is restructuring to enable the company to become more streamlined, focused and to better execute against its goals in 2013. As a result of these changes, the company will be profitable and will operate more quickly and efficiently and experiment more aggressively. We continue to grow and remain focused on providing the best discovery experience on the Web.

StumbleUpon reached 20 million users in late 2011 but has suffered somewhat as Reddit has become the Internet’s go-to hub for interesting content. Its audience skews a little older than Reddit’s, and its last few redesigns, including one just four months ago, have met with mixed reviews. Still, it has continued innovating with stunning mobile apps and a new Windows 8 app.

Unfortunately, despite all the work and innovation, StumbleUpon’s traffic graph looks like the Marlboro Man’s cigarette in the anti-smoking ads:

Source: Compete.com

StumbleUpon traffic, according to Compete

That’s 9.7 million unique monthly visitors at the beginning of 2012, dropping off to 5.8 million at the end of the year.

The restructuring may be about refocusing, getting quicker, and experimenting more aggressively, and being profitable is wonderful, but unless StumbleUpon can reverse this traffic decline, this layoff won’t be the company’s last.

photo credit: muffytyrone via photopin cc

Content-discovery service StumbleUpon is fueling new life into a 10-year-old product that was once teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. The most dramatic evidence of such can be seen in the its just-released application for Windows 8.

“Another day, another StumbleUpon app,” you moan.

I hear you. Yes, the Windows 8 application embodies all that’s shiny and new in StumbleUpon’s sexed-up version of its website, and it certainly matches its new iOS application in color and style. But here’s the thing: The Windows 8 app does all these things in a way that’s distinctly delightful and representative of the special characteristics of Microsoft’s PC and tablet-friendly platform.

“The dynamic, visually rich interface and interaction model of the Windows 8 operating system are a natural fit with StumbleUpon, which aims to bring surprise and fun to the experience of finding great stuff on the web,” StumbleUpon vice president of product Cody Simms said in a statement.

Here’s what he means: The StumbleUpon application uses Windows 8 live tiles as an instant way to view dynamically recommended articles, photos, videos, recipes, and so forth from the Start screen of their desktop or tablet.

When inside the application, a grid of bright photo thumbnails acts as the homepage and provides a visual collage of sorts. From here, you can choose a fetching thumbnail as a stumbling off point and start browsing in an uncluttered, full-screen view. Alternatively, you can pan to the right of the homepage to see a hodgepodge of trending stories, friends’ stumbles, and expert curators’ picks.

Something else you won’t find in any of StumbleUpon’s other reimagined applications is a feature called “Snap View.” The option, a multitasking characteristic of the Windows 8 software, allows you to stumble while using other applications. In this mode, you can snap StumbleUpon to a quarter of the screen, so that content recommendations flow into the column as you perform activities inside other apps.

StumbleUpon for Windows 8 is the startup’s first application for Windows. The app originally started as a hackathon-style project, but it was so impressed by the machination that the app was fast-tracked through to full production status and developed in just two months.

An all-new, radically different StumbleUpon web experience arrives Tuesday to provide the service’s more than 25 million content seekers with reworked ways to explore videos, photos, news, and articles from across the web.

Ten-year-old StumbleUpon, having just released a new experience for iPhone and iPad, is in the midst of a design and user experience awakening. The company, under the direction of new vice president of product Cody Simms, is remaking all of its products to be more personal and playful.

The all-new StumbleUpon.com. Click to enlarge

The new StumbleUpon.com includes many of the same mobile features rolled out last week, including a modernized homepage, ways to stumble through trending content and friends’ activity, and StumbleDNA, or a color-coded identity module that highlights each member’s likes. The web application also introduces a feature called “Lists” for organizing likes into shareable collections.

“We feel that the act of Stumbling across the web is unique and different,” Simms told VentureBeat. “The purpose of the StumbleUpon website is to help you find great stuff as a jumping off point to Stumbling.”

Most striking is the look and feel of the StumbleUpon homepage, which captures the essence of the iOS home screen but does so in a Pinterest-like fashion. Here stumblers are given three primary ways to thumb through the web’s treasure trove of content: via their interests, friends’ activity, or trending stories. The latter section showcases items generating the most amount of likes, shares, or community reactions.

Unlike on StumbleUpon for iOS, which employs an elegant, one-at-a-time “slide” approach for stumbling, the web stumbling experience starts with a hodgepodge of content pictured in rectangular boxes, à la Pinterest. The boxed style is apparent on each initial stumble page and provides the visitor with a smorgasbord of items, color-coded by interest, to select from.

“The layout, design, and navigation of the site in this iteration is built to optimize for quick scanning and quick access to content. We looked at a lot of different models and feel this design is the most effective model for content discovery,” said Simms in response to a question on why the company went with a design that echoes Pinterest’s popular style.

StumbleDNA, the color-coded bar that denotes a person’s tastes, gets more love on the web than it does on iPhone. The bar appears atop each page and is also now a prominent part of each member’s profile so that friends and followers can get a better sense of who the member is and what he or she likes.

The net effect of the redesign is that the first-time StumbleUpon visitor, returning lover, or long-time flame is given a never-ending stream of things to see, consume, like, or stash away for safe-keeping.

The new StumbleUpon.com is available to all members as a beta release. Members can opt-in to the refreshed experience from the settings section of the application. A version for Android is said to be development.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

StumbleUpon’s new application for iPhone and iPad offers iOS users a fresh, colorful, and personalized twist on the now 10-year-old practice of thumbing through the best the web has to offer.

Released Wednesday, the app sports a new head-to-toe look, a stumble-centric navigation experience for instant gratification, a modified home screen for alternative ways to stumble, and new trending, “slide,” and “StumbleDNA” features that make for a faster, more personal browsing experience.

Founded in 2002, StumbleUpon is the resurrected startup that helps people uncover interesting photos, articles, and videos. The web exploration company, which was purchased by eBay in 2007 and then sold back to its owners in 2009, now has more than 25 million users and is growing fastest on mobile.

The new StumbleUpon experience for iOS looks and feels like no other product the veteran company has released to date — and that’s quite intentional.

“This app, to me, is the first step in really reimagining our product line,” StumbleUpon’s vice president of product Cody Simms told me. “We looked at how we could improve the navigation … while bringing a new element of fun and fluidity to the experience overall.”

The playfulness Simms speaks is most evident in an eye-catching design that screams, “come touch me.”

The new home screen encourages mobile folks to flit about the web, albeit with purpose, by stumbling in four ways: thumbing through content picked specifically for them, exploring articles in an all-new trending section, stumbling the activities of friends, or diving into selections around a particular interest.

The trending section suggests hot content getting the most amount of likes, shares, or community reactions, while activity mode exposes what friends and StumbleUpon ordained experts are liking for a more diverse selection of content.

Once the stumbling process is started, the application user will immediately uncover a StumbleUpon innovation called “slide.” Slide is a new feature that provides people with an instant, visual preview of content so that they can speedily skim and flick through articles, videos, and photos.

The stumbler will also notice that a color-coded bar follows them through the app. The bar, otherwise known as StumbleDNA, is meant to be a visual representation of who you are and what you like. Colors in the bar denote specific interests, and the bar changes with your changing tastes.

Altogether, the iOS app, said Simms, should accomplish three key tasks: help people stumble in new ways, weave identity into the experience so that StumbleUpon is a reflection of a person’s likes, and alter for the better how the service recommends content to its users.

“This iOS launch … is really the first experience of these coming to life in our product set that you’ll start to see across everything else we do,” Simms said.

The company said a new web version is coming soon and that a refreshed Android app is also in development.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Whether you want it or not, Microsoft will release its Windows 8 operating system on October 26. The new OS upends the familiar Start menu-based interface you’ve known since Windows 95 in favor of one more streamlined for tablets.

In light of the major interface change, Windows 8 could be the next Vista, with users skipping a generation of Windows over real and imagined problems. Microsoft desperately wants to make sure this doesn’t happen, so Windows 8 will cost just $40 to upgrade, versus the $100+ price that Windows has carried in the past.

Another way Microsoft hopes to bring people over to Windows 8: killer apps. Following Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores, Windows 8 will have its own dedicated marketplace where users can discover and download apps. Companies like Doo.net and Evernote have already built Windows 8 apps and made them available in the store, even though the OS hasn’t yet been released.

After extensively looking around the Windows 8 Store, we’re pleasantly surprised with the quality of apps already available. We’ve picked out 10 stand-out apps that look and work great on Windows 8. Most of these apps will work fine for desktop users, but as with most aspects of Windows 8, these provide a better experience using a touch screen. Also, while the store includes a few decent games such as Cut the Rope and Pirates Love Daisies, we’ve decided to stick to more traditional apps for this list.

Here are our favorite 10 apps so far:

1. The Big Picture

One of my favorite blogs on the web is Boston.com’s The Big Picture. It takes eye-popping photos from around the world and presents them in large-scale form to make them easy to consume. It’s totally engrossing. Now The Big Picture experience can be had in a beautiful full-screen Windows 8 app. You can easily scroll through this week’s best photos from The Big Picture or look through the blog’s archive. If you really connect with a photo, you can save it to your computer for later viewing. Be warned: You could get lost for hours.

2. Cocktail Flow

Cocktail Flow wants to be your personal bartending assistant. The beautiful app lets you swipe or click-through different kinds of alcoholic beverages and tells you how to make them. Drinks are sorted by alcohol type, drink color, or drink type. The app includes a panel for saving your favorite drinks for reference later. This app might be somewhat simplistic, but it looks slick and could be your best friend whenever you host a trendy party.

3. CookBook

Plenty of sites and mobile apps are dedicated to recipes, but CookBook streamlines them all into a well-designed interface for Windows 8. On the left-hand panel, CookBook sorts recipes by the following categories: appetizers, bread, breakfast, desserts, main dish, salad, side dish, and soups. Click any recipe and you’ve got a large photo, user rating, ingredients, and directions — all key to helping you decide if you want to invest your time into making that item. The app also makes it easy to save your favorites and recipes you’d like “try soon.”

4. Fresh Paint

Fresh Paint is an incredibly fun app created by Microsoft to demonstrate Windows 8′s touch capabilities. It’s more than just promotional junkware, since the app lets you paint realistically in delightful ways. You can select different brushes and colors to paint with, and each stroke of the brush adds to other colors in a way that smears other colors. All in all, it’s a blast and another app you can lose yourself in for hours. I can’t wait to try it on Microsoft’s Surface tablet.

5. Inrix

Inrix provides a look at real-time traffic conditions around the world. The service claims to use “billions of data points” to help people make smarter driving conditions. In the use case for Windows 8, this would be best for tablet use when you are out and about. Or if you’re a planner like me, you could use the app to check traffic conditions before you leave the house.

Check out apps 6 through 10.

Pages: 1 2

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Browsing is flawed — on the Web, but even more so on mobile. That’s the message Trapit co-founder Hank Nothhaft conveyed to me as he demoed his solution to the problem: a Trapit iPad application that uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalized content.

Trapit is the two-year-old, venture-backed intelligent discovery engine that hails from CALO, the same DARPA-commissioned artificial-intelligence project that birthed Apple’s Siri. The company’s eight-month-old product serves up nearly 5 million content recommendations a day from 120,000 human-vetted sources to consumers who use the tool to find fresh news, videos, articles, recipes, and images on the topics that interest them most.

“Here we want to bring the Web to the user and make it really seamless to browse,” Nothhaft said, highlighting the limitations of browsers and a search-and-seek approach to finding content on mobile. “We do that with a topic-based, personalized approach.”

Trapit for iPad fetches content for people across their pre-defined “traps,” or areas of interest, but it does so in a way that’s meant to be even more visually and mentally pleasing than the company’s Web offering.

The application features a fluid interface that caters to the whims of the consummate mobile browser. Traps expand and give way to a smattering of content selected for each individual. Those using the application can touch a selection to enlarge it and from there click to consume, saving the content to their reading lists for later, sharing it to social networks, or choosing to provide feedback in the way of a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down vote to help Trapit get better at making spot-on recommendations.

The application also offers people a way to browse a wide variety of content across hundreds of curated traps, and it helps them create new traps with suggestions covering categories like entertainment, business, and science.

“We’ve finally found the right interface to convey … that our underlying approach and technology is radically different and much more capable and flexible [than news readers],” Nothhaft said, addressing the company’s critics.

Trapit, however, has yet to reach the recognition level of artificial-intelligence sibling Siri, let alone command the same type of attention as mobile-friendly content discovery apps Flipboard and StumbleUpon. The service has just hundreds of thousands of active patrons as of June. Nothhaft is confident, however, that mobile will draw new users to Trapit.

“What we’re not doing is presenting a fixed taxonomy of the world where [individuals] have to subscribe to different feeds or just repackaging an existing social feed,” he said. “We’re much more than just a beautiful container for content.”

Older than Facebook, 10-year-old Internet discovery engine StumbleUpon may also be wiser.

The social web exploration company is growing fastest on mobile, but unlike behemoth social network Facebook, Stumbleupon has not-so-accidentally stumbled upon a formula for serving ads to mobile users in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the bottom line.

“Figuring out how to monetize mobile is a big thing a lot of companies are trying to solve right now, and StumbleUpon has that pretty well sorted out,” newly appointed vice president of product Cody Simms told me in an interview.

Cody Simms, vice president of product, StumbleUpon

That matters because the resurrected startup now sees 25 percent of all stumbles — the startup’s namesake activity for discovering or recommending news, photos, videos, and all other things web content — happen on mobile. The company operates content discovery applications optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Android. In December 2011, StumbleUpon announced that mobile growth increased 800 percent year-over-year.

In talking with Simms and director of communications Mike Mayzel, one thing became clear: Mobile is StumbleUpon’s Promised Land and the key to its continued resurgence.

StumbleUpon is the reborn startup first founded in 2002 that’s somehow stood the test of time while others with similar takes around online content discovery haven’t fared so well, a fact made most apparent by the collapse and fire sale of social news site Digg.

Since obtaining its independence from eBay in 2009, the StumbleUpon service has thrived, growing from 5 million to 25 million users. StumbleUpon users spend, on average, seven hours with the service each month. The average stumble session lasts more than an hour, Simms said.

The company monetizes its service through a Paid Discovery advertising platform, which, along with all product and design efforts, now falls under Simms’ care. StumbleUpon declined to share revenue figures.

Simply put, advertisers turn to StumbleUpon for traffic. Advertisers’ sites are integrated into the StumbleUpon stream, making them discoverable to users who click the “stumble” button on web or mobile. Advertisers pay $0.05, $0.10, or $0.25 per impression, with rates based on the desired amount of guaranteed engagement. Though the company offers a self-serve product, it also employs a dedicated sales team to go after larger publishers and advertisers. In total, StumbleUpon has 75,000 advertisers.

“I think our revenue model works great on mobile,” Simms said. Mobile and monetization go hand-in-hand for StumbleUpon, he said.

“In mobile, you’re browsing through the stumble experience, going from site to site on our service. Some of those are paid sites,” he explained. “You find them just as relevant as the non-paid sites. If users don’t find them relevant, they get thumbed down and they start to disappear from our service. If users find them relevant, they get thumbed up and they get served to more users.”

StumbleUpon’s advertisers can structure campaigns around mobile and target specific devices if they desire. Half of the company’s active advertisers run mobile campaigns in addition to desktop campaigns, Mayzel said.

“StumbleUpon has always been solving a problem that needs to be solved,” said Simms. “As we’ve moved from platform to platform, that’s been the same. It started with a Firefox plugin, then it became a web toolbar, and now mobile.”

The problem Simms speaks of is content discovery in an ever-expanding web.

“As the web expands, StumbleUpon becomes more important. StumbleUpon is super relevant in mobile, and as more and more stuff even becomes mobile, StumbleUpon just gets better in that regard.”

But you’re likely to hear more about this new service for discovering and sharing online content, as it’s growing by 150,000 users each week — and just today added significant new features to make social surfing recommendations to help users discover and enjoy new web content and sites.

Formerly called InfoAxe, Flipora grew from a service that helped users simply find sites they’ve already visited. You’ve likely experienced this problem: You found a great site, but can’t find it later. And you can’t find the data you know is available on that page. InfoAxe helped you search your history.

The company rebranded to Flipora late last year, and today it announced a significant new direction: social discovery of new web content. VentureBeat spoke to Jonathan Siddharth, one of the cofounders.

On the surface, the new Flipora features are much like StumbleUpon. Users select interests from 57 different topic areas and then surf the web within the Flipora service on those topic areas. Content inside Flipora is based on what others users find interesting.

Instead of “stumbling” to find new content they like, users “flip” web pages:

But there’s a key difference between StumbleUpon and Flipora…and indeed Twitter, Facebook, or any other service that web surfers use to find new content. Instead of articles or videos being entered via contributor’s choices — a post, a tweet, or a stumble — Flipora lives inside users’ browsers and shares an aggregated view of all users surfing habits, which builds a vast array of website popularity data.

Flipora announced the change to their own users like this:

We’ve been making it easy for our users to go back to where they’ve been in the past…what we’re announcing today is a way for users to discover where to go next ….

The key is in the web-browsing history that originally was only for your own personal consumption, to help you find previously viewed pages and information. Now that data is collected, uploaded, and stored with others users’ data. And similar to an Amazon.com people-who-liked-X-product-also-liked-Y way, it generates new suggested sites for all users.

And that’s lot of data. Flipora currently has 8 million users. To operate the social-discovery engine, the company indexes 20 million web pages daily — an amount equivalent to six times the size of Wikipedia.

The key questions, of course, are the same as those Facebook faced when it enabled “frictionless sharing“: What happens to privacy when everything is shared? And similarly, what happens to quality when there is no discrimination between what is shared and what is unshared?

VentureBeat asked Siddharth and his co-CEO, and Vijay Krishnan these a few questions:

VentureBeat:
You seem to be almost half the size of StumbleUpon without near its attention. How have you grown so large so quietly?

Siddharth:
Correct. Flipora, previously Infoaxe, is probably the largest consumer Internet company that no one in Silicon Valley has heard of. [Smiles] We are a small team relative to the size of our user base, and we’ve just not had enough time to focus on anything besides working on the product and scaling for the growth we’re seeing.

Until we raised our $3 million round in late 2010, our full-time team in Silicon Valley was just Vijay and myself. We had some really great engineers working remotely. Once we raised the round, we hired them full time. In hindsight, we should have probably done a better job of getting the word out in Silicon Valley, since it helps greatly with hiring. Additionally, our user growth is also extremely spread out across the world, rather than being confined to the U.S. alone. We have users from over 200 countries worldwide.

Our growth has been largely organic. Flipora’s web history search engine is a unique product with very few competitors who are able to do it at scale.

We’ve been beta testing the discovery feature for a while and that has been really good at drawing new users. We offer great recommendations and give users easy tools to share them on Facebook and Twitter. People who click through to the recommended webpage are shown other related recommendations that keeps them engaged, in a manner similar to YouTube where users who come to see a video [and] end up clicking through and consuming related videos shown on the side.

VentureBeat:
Flipora has enjoyed growth in 2012. Why is it happening now?.

Siddharth:
We did a massive redesign of the core web history product in late 2011, vastly improving its ease of use and beta testing the discovery feature. Both of these are the key contributors to growth. Flipora’s web history product was already a uniquely differentiated product with very few alternatives. The redesign and product enhancements greatly helped usage and growth.

We crossed 8 million users last week and are growing by 25,000 users/day. We see users using the beta version of the discovery product flipping as many as 300 pages a day which is extremely encouraging to us. In our beta tests, our unique product innovations like the side bar that lets you preview the recommendations coming next while also allowing a user to easily skip over items that are not interesting greatly increased usage.

Our recommendation engine quality is also going to keep improving. What we have live now is just version one. We are working on big updates to our algorithms that will drastically improve recommendation quality in the coming months. The product does get better the more you use it, as it learns your interests from use.

VentureBeat:
How does Flipora address privacy concerns.

Siddharth:
The answer is transparency and offering easy ways for users to opt-out of sharing any data they are not comfortable sharing. We take privacy very seriously at Flipora and have had a very meticulous approach to this right from day 1.

1. A user’s web history is private by default and is never shared with anyone. We don’t share data with third parties. You explicitly choose what you want to share. The fact that right from the time a user signs up, we are upfront about being a web-history search engine, and the fact that the user experience with our product is most effective when they save their browsing history with us, has greatly enabled users to be comfortable with the data that we collect.

2. We offer a “record” button that can be turned “off” if you want to go off the record.

3. We offer a private “block list” of sites that you can set up. Page views on those sites are not recorded even if you accidentally had record on. More important, this “block list” resides on your browser. Even Flipora does not know what the block list is.

4. The recommendation engine only uses aggregate, anonymized browsing data.

5. In the last decade, Internet users as a whole have fundamentally got more comfortable with the idea of some of their information being accessible to consumer Internet companies, which has indeed powered the growth of several billion dollar consumer internet businesses.

Web-based e-mail providers have made Internet users much more comfortable with having their private e-mail stored on remote servers, rather than on their local machines. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, personal finance management services like mint.com…have made users much more comfortable with the idea of sharing their personal information with consumer Internet companies, as long as the data is secure and the product offers them compelling value. These, coupled with the fact that we are up front about what data you collect and our clear privacy policy and terms of service, have gone a long way in alleviating privacy concerns regarding our product.

VentureBeat:
What about reality bubble issues? Can or do you introduce serendipity into the pages you show people?

Krishnan:
We try to balance exploration and exploitation in our recommendations. We recommend websites that are related to what the user is in the mood for at the moment while still showing a small number of recommendations from other topics. For example, if we think the user is enjoying recommendations from the “cars” topic more, the user receives more recommendations from “cars” while still seeing recommendations from other topics in case she wants to explore other interests.

Algorithmic discovery has greater potential to widen a user’s horizons than social discovery, discovery based on what websites your friends share on Facebook or Twitter. With social discovery, there is a lot less serendipity since your friends are unlikely to share certain types of content. Your friends typically would not share content on Facebook or Twitter that they think would be uninteresting to their friends, politically sensitive, etc. So you see a much narrower spread of topics.

VentureBeat:
What are your long-term goals?

Krishnan:
Web history search will be the platform that helps us build an amazing Discovery Engine that truly understands a user’s interests, both explicitly declared and implicitly learned. We believe Discovery to be the natural evolution of web search itself. Web search works only when you know what you’re looking for and you know it exists. With our Discovery Engine, we can automatically push the most relevant websites to a user at the right time when she’s in the mood for it. With web history search, Flipora makes it easy for users to keep track of the great websites they discover and the data generated by this will continue to improve the discovery engine.

We think, just like Web search, Discovery will be an integral part of the web browser, answering the question of “where should I go next?” With the data advantage that we have — attention data from web browsing history — and the technology to mine that data, we are superexcited about some unique innovations we can offer in the discovery space. The discovery space is still very nascent making it ripe for disruption.

We are at 8 million users now and expect to double that in a year.

 VentureBeat:
Thank you for your time!

Other than the dedication of its founding team, few things have remained consistent at the click-to-discover, reborn startup StumbleUpon during its tumultuous, 10-year history. But, as frequent change has yet to kill the company, perhaps it can withstand the exit of its founder and CEO Garrett Camp.

Tuesday, Camp (pictured right) announced that he was stepping down from his CEO position and assuming the less demanding role of company chairman.

“I’ve decided to transition from CEO to a new role as Chairman of StumbleUpon, focused on the vision and strategy of the company while also starting a new venture,” Camp said in a blog post.

Under Camp and co-founder Geoff Smith, StumbleUpon thrived in its early days as a social browser utility for content discovery. In 2007, StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay where it nearly faded into oblivion. The founding team swooped back to the rescue in 2009 and the site has experienced a remarkable resurgence, growing from 5 million to 25 million users, ever since.

“The last 3 years have been incredible — completely rebuilding the company and expanding from a simple Firefox add-on to one of the largest discovery platforms on the Web,” Camp wrote.

Camp, also a founder and chairman at private car-for-hire startup Uber, is now retreating to satisfy his product design and strategy whims at a mystery venture, but he’s confident that he’s leaving his adolescent child in “capable hands.”

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving,” Camp tweeted Tuesday afternoon, quoting Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.

StumbleUpon is currently in search of a replacement for Camp.

Photo credit: StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon kicked its turnaround into higher gear Monday with the hire of its first-ever vice president of sales.

Teal Newland, a former Digitas executive and Disney brand strategist, has joined the long-running web discovery engine and will oversee StumbleUpon’s advertising sales efforts, the company announced Monday.

StumbleUpon, the random click-to-uncover-the-web service, is a startup created by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, and Ram Shriram. The site first launched in 2001, was acquired by eBay (where it nearly lost all relevance) in 2007 for $75 million, and then was sold back to its original founders in 2009.

The then newly independent company fought its way back from obscurity, landed $17 million more in funding, and surpassed 20 million users in October of last year. The reborn startup says it now serves more than 1.2 billion content recommendations each month.

As a popular serendipitous content discovery aide, StumbleUpon has managed to attract 75,000 brands, publishers, and marketers to its Paid Discovery platform. The ad product, akin to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories offering, allows advertisers to promote and target their content in a holistic, site-appropriate fashion.

Newland, who has the hook-up with big brands such as Delta and Intel through her former Digitas gig, has been brought on board to hawk the Paid Discovery platform and help the now 11-year-old company bring in more revenue.

StumbleUpon has offices in San Francisco and New York. Newland will be based in the New York office. The company declined to disclose revenue information.

Photo credit: StumbleUpon