StumbleUpon Unveils Paid Discovery, Its New "No Click" Ad Platform

Content discovery engine StumbleUpon, which most recently received 17 million in Series B funding, is unveiling a new ad platform today, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery. Whereas the old Stumble ad model was primarily targeted to getting traffic for publishers, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp tells me that Paid Discovery is setting its sights on bigger brands, like movie studios promoting a movie or stuff like NFL teams promoting their sites.

Paid Discovery ads (which can range in format from websites, videos to mobile sites etc) will show up in a Stumbler’s stream without them having to click on a banner or other kind of intermediary mechanism. Advertisers can drill down on the targeting the ads as well, by around 500 different topics and demographics like age, gender and location as well as by mobile platorm.

Users can also rate the quality of the ads, and more upvotes means additional (free) traffic.

Paid Discovery introduces a tiered pricing plan, serving priority and analytics services for campaigns, charging advertisers .10 or .25 per unique user depending on when the ad is served. The price points also include access to revamped system of analytics which takes into account information like user upvotes, demographics, share patterns and time spent on site.

We took some time to talk with StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp about the new platform and how it will affect the service’s more than 14 million users as well as advertisers. You can watch the entire interview above.