StumbleUpon breaks new record with 27.5 million “Stumbles”

StumbleUpon, the company that recently surpassed Facebook to become the number one website for generating social media traffic in the U.S, just broke a new record with 27.5 million stumbles yesterday, according to a recent tweet from StumbleUpon CEO and Founder Garrett Camp.

StumbleUpon is well known for driving thousands of visitors to websites that have been “Stumbled.” The sites are then marked with with a “Thumbs Up” by other StumbleUpon users (of which there are reportedly over 12 million), in effect vouching for the site as a legitimate source of information.

In April 2010, Statcounter stated that Stumbleupon was consistently in the top two Social Media sites in terms of generating traffic, bypassing Facebook back in March 2010.

Camp founded StumbleUpon in November 2001 with Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd while Camp was a post-grad in Calgary, Canada. After moving to San Francisco, the guys raised $1.2 million a number of angel investors including Brad O’Neill, Ram Shriram, Mitch Kapor, First Round Capital and Ron Conway.

In 2007, eBay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million and owned the company until 2009 when
Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with headquarters in San Francisco and offices in New York City.