StumbleUpon Lays Off 30% Of Staff | Hacker News Reader

StumbleUpon Lays Off 30% Of Staff

techcrunch.com

42 pointsantr20 comments

I tried to advertise on StumbleUpon many times a few years back and they always rejected everything I submitted. Yet they still spammed me from time to time asking me to advertise. I'm not surprised to see them laying people off when they make it so difficult to give them money.

I've had the same experience. I've submitted several sites and pages to their Paid Discovery program but none have been approved. Oh well.

Strange. Personally I used StumbleUpon quite a lot early 2012. But I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I started using it less and less.

If I think about it now, I think I get almost all of the relevant contents via HN and the trust ole' Google Reader.

StumbleUpon (I think) is really for just "randomly" going through the contents which I 'might' like.

Plus, I think getprismatic and bottlenose came into the scene and totally crowded my content discovery methods, in the end I had to filter out all the noise. I concluded HN was the best source of the contents relevant to me.

What do others think?

Getprismatic is so completely engrossing and addictive for me I just stay the heck away.

?? if it's that good, shouldn't it be your primary way of getting the contents? :)

I find it quite good too. So it looks as though I'm coming back for it more.

Then there's this HN....

"What this change does do is it brings us into a profitable situation.”

In the same article, we find out they were founded in 2001 and bought by eBay in 2007. In 2009, the original founder buys the company back and runs into problems. And NOW they're hoping to be profitable.

It must be the "not being from/around the Valley" part of me, but I don't understand businesses that operate for years without turning a profit. Yeah, I suppose after X years you MIGHT be a Google or Facebook or whatever. I guess that's just not the dream for me.

It was so brave of you to criticize a company on Hacker News for not being profitable.

This comment contributes nothing to the conversation. Leave the "So brave" comments at Reddit.

If you have something informative to say, I'd like to hear it.

The claim by the parent is that they aren't just some new startup, but that they've been in the game for quite a while (12 years by parent's numbers) and are just now expecting profit. This isn't exactly the same as a blanket criticism of startups that aren't profitable due to the sheer magnitude of time for StumbleUpon.

>I don't understand businesses that operate for years without turning a profit.

The article is just stating that StumbleUpon wasn't profitable recently but will be after making staff cuts. They may have been profitable at various points in the past.

Virtually all of the huge web successes went for long periods of time without profits so not worth being surprised by this.

A lot, yes, but not "virtually all".

As a counter-example, one of the biggest logistical problems that eBay had early on was opening envelopes full of cash fast enough.

Spoken like a true chicagoan :)

Maybe they seemed hotter back in 2009, before the browser, from my estimation, became much less of the platform from which to bookmark from? It's already a pain to install the plugin manually...It must be much more annoyance to have to open up a separate mobile app to use the service (which, on iOS, I assume kicks you into the generic Safari viewer).

> It seems that StumbleUpon’s newfound profitability could make the company more attractive to a potential acquirer.

Needing to be profitable in order to be an attractive acquisition target? Yow, it's a new world.

Love how the article discusses when they've gotten funding, but never discusses revenues. "Funding" feels like it's talked about like a blessing, a manna from above, as opposed to what it is: investment/debt that the lender expects to see a return on.

Honest question - Are they losing ground due to onslaught from social/content discovery apps (like Flipboard) in last couple of years?

I last used SU a year or so ago and the quality of results was pretty abysmal.

Lots of spam/low quality content farmed articles and the odd gem.

SU was a useful alternative to Search, but there are now plenty of other (social/content discovery) options that return better results.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stumbleupon.com#

Compete shows 9m -> 6m in last 12 months: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stumbleupon.com

Haven't been on there in years, mostly due to the fact that as a heavy user, I was getting deluged by spam (less common) and repeat links (more common). I'm sure they fixed this by now, but it's so hard to change habits once you get away from using a service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com