Jan 19, 2011 12:00 GMT  ·  By

For many years StumbleUpon looked like just another web service slowly moving towards its demise. Introduced way back in 2001 it failed to get much traction after eBay acquired it. For the past couple of years or so it's been making a comeback and it is now beginning to pick up some serious steam. The service just announced that it just set a new all-time record for most 'stumbles' in a day, 27.5 million.

"Yesterday, Stumblers set an all-time record by stumbling 27.5 million times – that’s 320 a second! Our discovery engine was ON FIRE. :-)," StumbleUpon tweeted.

It's hard to put this number in context, but it's still an impressive metric. The record activity day comes after a few strong months, particularly December when the site got 700 million stumbles, around 22.5 million per day, on average.

This compared to December 2009, when the site saw some 400 million stumbles, indicating that 2010 has been a particularly good year.

The site has been adding new users at an increased pace. It's now at about 13 million, having reached 12 million last November. It continues to add some 500,000 to 600,000 new users each month.

And those users are visiting an increasing number of sites via StumbleUpon, to the point where traffic from the social discovery service is outpacing significantly larger players and even keeping up with Facebook when it comes to referral traffic.

StumbleUpon launched in 2001 as a way of discovering new content online, vetted by users. This would ensure a level of quality for the site referenced. It also enabled users to find interesting new stuff online with as little effort as possible.

It lingered after being acquired by eBay, failing to attract any significant growth. However, StumbleUpon split from eBay in 2009, becoming an independent company and hasn't looked back since, enjoying a new level of success.