Last week I was on the MIT campus where I interviewed Garrett Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon, the San Francisco-based company that allows users to organize and recommend online videos. The company was sold to eBay in June for $75 million. Garrett, 28, was honored by MIT's Technology Review as one of the one of the world's most accomplished innovators under 35. The company was covered in a big story in today's New York Times.Garrett told me that not a lot has changed since the acquisition and that StumbleUpon still operates largely independently from eBay. The company has recently introduced a novel advertising approach: Advertisers can sign up to have a particular Web page "served" into the process of "stumbling." Meaning, users who are looking for a topic and click a video to view will be shown a web page that matches the demographic and interests of the "stumbler." Garrett explains that there are few of these pages served -- just about one in twenty "stumbles" find an inserted advertiser Web page. We assume that the page loads for a limited time and then leads to the requested video. In our interview he also explains how the demographics of StumbleUpon are moving past the "early adopters." For background and a demonstration of StumbeUpon, check out my interview with Garrett from December.Grab the embed code of this interview with Garrett Camp.-- Andy PlesserPosted on Sunday, October 7, 2007http://www.beet.tv/2007/10/ebays-stumbleup.html
