StumbleUpon Is Shutting Down, Transferring Accounts to Mix

StumbleUpon is a site discovery and content publishing service which was founded in 2002 and is officially shutting down today even though it says it will transfer is accounts to another content discovery platform Mix.

The platform was apparently one of the first of its kind when it started in 2002, furnishing users with a dead-straightforward approach to discover new sites to visit, articles to peruse, and pictures and video to engage with. It likewise happened to touch base when individuals were moving on from utilising the web for fundamental capacities like research and money related exchanges, to killing time and other sharing functions with connections.

In a statement today on Medium, StumbleUpon Co-founder Garrett Camp says,

Sixteen years ago, we started StumbleUpon to help people discover new webpages. The idea was simple: click a button to find a cool webpage. It was easy and fun. Over the years SU has delivered personalized content to over 40 million users, serving up nearly 60 billion stumbles. StumbleUpon pioneered content discovery on the web, before the concepts of the “like button”, “news feed” or “social media” were mainstream.

StumbleUpon was one of the social media pioneers to increase genuine footing on the web and has been utilised by around 40 million individuals since its beginning, as per Camp. Clients could share their most loved sites and pages, submit appraisals and ratings, and get related content.

Its competitors include Digg and Reddit (about 1.6 billion reportedly visited Reddit between April 2017 and March 2018) are still in business. Being a social media pioneer, it wasn’t able to withstand the trends in the industry after it sold itself to eBay in 2007 for about $75m. Two years later it was sold back to its original founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith.

The company had a series of difficulties in raising fresh funds and was forced to lay off many of its staff which later led to Camp reacquiring majority shares of the company.

Camp was also a co-founder of Uber and is still on the board of the ride hailing firm. He set up Expa in 2013 to form new companies and Mix is one of those companies that was founded from Expa.

Garrett Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon is now asking users to transition their accounts to his other project, MIx. Mix was founded in 2015 and is also a content discovery service that looks something like Pinterest.

It looks like the company even struggled to survive till this point but as Camp himself puts it,

Creating StumbleUpon has been an amazing experience. It was the first project I worked on back in college in 2002. I have personally clicked the stumble button hundreds of thousands of times, and learned a lot in the process. But it’s now time to focus on the future, and create the next discovery platform that will uncover hidden gems we would never think to search for.