What Happened to StumbleUpon?

If you ever pressed a Stumble! button and landed on a page you would never have searched for, you were using StumbleUpon. It was a website and browser toolbar that showed you a random page from across the internet every time you pressed its Stumble! button, picked to match the interests you chose. It started in the early 2000s as a college project by Garrett Camp and his friends, was bought by eBay in 2007 and bought back in 2009. At its peak, tens of millions of people used it to find funny pages and strange blogs they'd never have searched for. StumbleUpon shut down in June 2018, and its users were moved to a new site called Mix.

How did StumbleUpon work?

StumbleUpon worked by sending you to a random web page that matched the topics you'd picked. When you signed up, you chose interests like photography, history, comedy or science.

Then you pressed Stumble!, and a new page loaded. Liked it? Thumbs up.

Hated it? Thumbs down. Over time, it got better at guessing what you'd like.

The button lived in a toolbar at the top of your browser. Every click was a little surprise, and plenty of people clicked for hours, sometimes forgetting what they'd originally sat down to do. Homework was always "right after one more."

Where it came from

StumbleUpon started in a dorm room at the University of Calgary in Canada. Garrett Camp and his friends built it as a way to find interesting websites without having to know what to search for. It began as one of the first toolbar add-ons for the Firefox browser, and an Internet Explorer version came out in 2006.

The company later moved to San Francisco and raised money from investors. By the time eBay came calling, StumbleUpon had millions of users.

eBay and the buyback

In 2007, eBay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million. It was an odd match, and the site didn't grow much under eBay. In 2009, Camp and some of the original investors bought StumbleUpon back.

After that, StumbleUpon had its biggest years. The toolbar kept working the same way, but the company added new ways to stumble, including videos and more ways to follow what your friends liked. It added apps for the iPad and phones in 2010, and by 2011 it had around 20 million users. Over its whole life, about 40 million people used it.

Picking your interests

Signing up meant scrolling through a long list of interests and checking boxes. Most people picked a few obvious ones, like music or movies, and then some oddly specific ones, like architecture or space. Those choices shaped everything StumbleUpon showed you, so one box you checked by accident could fill your stumbles with pages about knitting for weeks.

You could change your interests later, and plenty of people did, tuning their stumbles until it felt like the site knew them.

Pages you'd never search for

StumbleUpon was great at showing you things you'd never think to look for. Optical illusions. One man's collection of vintage toasters. A gallery of abandoned buildings. Every so often a recipe or a Flash game that would have fit right in at the lunch period arcade.

You never knew what was next, and that was the fun of it.

Plenty of small websites got huge surges of visitors when StumbleUpon sent people their way. Bloggers and website owners watched their traffic stats jump overnight after landing on someone's thumbs up.

The habit

StumbleUpon was the kind of site you opened "for a minute" and closed two hours later. It filled the spaces between homework, the time before bed and the slow parts of a workday. It was a lot like the websites we rushed home from school to check, except you never knew which one you'd land on.

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Sharing your finds

StumbleUpon was social too. You could follow friends and see what they liked, and you could send a page straight to someone on the site. Each page also showed who first discovered it, and being the first person to stumble on a page that went on to get thousands of thumbs up felt like a small win.

Lots of people also shared their best finds the old-fashioned way, by copying the link into an IM or a chain-style email to friends.

Why did StumbleUpon shut down?

StumbleUpon shut down in June 2018 after years of losing ground to social media feeds. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit became the main places people found new links after Digg faded, and phones made a single "random page" button feel a little old-fashioned. The company had already shrunk a lot.

Camp announced the shutdown in May 2018, and the site closed on June 30, 2018. Users could move their favorites and interests to Mix, a new site Camp's company had built. Camp had also co-founded Uber along the way, so StumbleUpon wasn't his only big idea.

Stumbling on your phone

The phone apps that arrived in 2010 put the same idea in your pocket. Instead of a button in a toolbar, you tapped the screen and a new page slid in. It was a perfect way to fill a bus ride or a wait at the doctor's office, and plenty of people who'd never used the toolbar found StumbleUpon through the app.

Your stumble history

Stumbling today

StumbleUpon's whole idea was finding things by chance instead of by search. FriendCrib has a little of that too. Try a random crib and see where you end up, or make a crib of your own so someone can stumble onto you.