Back in September, we reported on a StumbleUpon change that flew somewhat under the radar (as StumbleUpon news often does for some reason, despite the service being a huge driver of social media referral traffic to websites).

With the change, users who submitted content to StumbleUpon via the social button on website content pages, got a new submission flow. In the past, hitting the button would present users with something like this:

This required the user to select an interest and encouraged the addition of tags and comments. With the change, things became much simpler. Now you just get this:

Then this:

After clicking yes on that is where things get more helpful for sites looking for referral traffic from StumbleUpon. Users are presented with links to more submitted content from the site as well as the option to simply stumble more from that site in general.

The changes were not reflected in the downloadable StumbleUpon toolbar for web browsers until now. I use it pretty regularly, and only started noticing the change today.

The toolbar used to be the primary way people used StumbleUpon, but it’s clear that it’s not as big a focus for the company these days. We talked to CEO Mark Bartels about this a while back. He told us, “It still has a lot of power users, but the team resources & growth is on mobile and Web Toolbar.”

He did note that people do underestimate how big and solid the desktop market is.

“A lot people spend ~8 hours a day in front of a PC,” he said, and noted that StumbleUpon’s strongest days on always weekends and Mondays.

A report from Shareaholic earlier this year showed that StumbleUpon traffic referrals were back on the rise. The new functionality as well as the company’s email strategy have no doubt been contributors to that. Adding the functionality to the toolbar should only help increase referrals all the more.