Change is good

Marc Leibowitz, VP of business development and marketing and one of the three executives calling the shots around StumbleUpon these days, acknowledged that traffic fell after the changes made in December. It’s a consequence of StumbleUpon’s efforts to improve the product, he said. "The amount of traffic that we drive around the web ultimately could continue to go down," he said. "In some ways we don’t actually worry about, ‘are we sending as much total stumble traffic?’ as we do, ‘are users spending a lot of time on the page?’"

Basically, StumbleUpon was trying to make its product better for users by tuning the algorithm and making sure the site looked good on mobile devices. But what's good for users doesn't necessarily please StumbleUpon's customers, which include mostly brands and publishers. StumbleUpon was in the habit of promising advertisers organic traffic in addition to paid traffic. Now the company has to explain that the traffic is smaller, but more targeted and therefore higher quality.

For many sites where traffic is a primary metric of success, that nuance can be hard to grasp. "We’ll continue to work with sites to help them better understand that," Leibowitz said. He bragged that StumbleUpon users are very engaged with the content, which is good for advertisers. "We really don’t hear from advertisers that we’re not giving them enough engaged users," Leibowitz said.

Instead, advertisers are asking for "more users," he said. Even as it ramps up its mobile offerings and tweaks the algorithm to keep stumblers sucked in for longer, StumbleUpon understands that it must increase traffic referrals in the U.S. and beyond. The company launched a U.K. version of the site a few weeks ago, with more countries planned for the coming months.