This may not be a new occurrence, but for the first time my eyes have seen third party advertising within StumbleUpon in the form of Google AdSense.
StumbleUpon uses the pay per stumble advertising model for companies which wish to draw more eyes to their web properties. However, it now seems that StumbleUpon, a bookmarking and web navigational social network, is now testing alternative forms of revenue generation via serving Google AdSense ads (pub ID : pub-4790703644985743).
One question which comes to mind is that if StumbleUpon is an eBay company, why is it serving Google’s contextual advertising?
eBay has a very important partnership deal with Yahoo where Yahoo uses Paypal as its payment system of choice while eBay is serving Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Display Ads on eBay properties. One would think that Ads by Google on StumbleUpon would show a bit of conflict in the eBay & Yahoo agreement.
StumbleUpon may still be running as its own autonomous company however, which would explain their use of Google AdSense.
Comments
3 responses so far ↓
Cameron Olthuis on Jul 20, 2007 at 12:20 pm
I’m pretty sure the AdSense ads only show up when you’re not logged into SU.
Loren Baker, Editor on Jul 20, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Hmmm… yeah Olthuis, looks like you’re correct.
I wonder how many users stumble into these site profiles who are not registered with StumbleUpon. They do have a lot of site reviews and user profiles indexed into Google.
I still find it interesting that SU has not made the eBay switch over to Y! SM ads. Perhaps the transition is still not complete… or AdSense is paying them better :)
Wayne Smallman on Jul 22, 2007 at 10:53 am
“I still find it interesting that SU has not made the eBay switch over to Y! SM ads. Perhaps the transition is still not complete… or AdSense is paying them better…”
That could be about right.
Maybe there’s some internal pressure to get an additional revenue stream on-line, but their own Y! advertising isn’t quite there yet.
So the Google AdSense route is easy money in the interim.
Politics aside, we’re going to be the only ones thinking about this.
The average Stumbler just won’t care less…
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