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StumbleUpon, an online discovery site that competes with Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, announced Tuesday that it has expanded its Partner Program to include Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com.

StumbleUpon’s Partner Program launched in October with HowStuffWorks, National Geographic, RollingStone Online, and HuffingtonPost. According to StumbleUpon, its Partner Program offers “premier” partners tools that allow them to help their users find desired content through the StumbleUpon index without surfing to StumbleUpon’s website, downloading its toolbar, or registering for an account.

By becoming a part of StumbleUpon’s Partner Program, “premier” publishers will allow users to view related articles, photos, and videos indexed by StumbleUpon on their own sites. StumbleUpon believes that offering that feature to its partners can increase exposure to the publisher’s best content and in turn, increase the appeal of StumbleUpon and its discovery engine. And although the company is still trailing behind Digg and Reddit, it believes its Partner Program could help it expand rapidly.

“StumbleUpon is fortunate to able to partner with these premier publishers to expose Stumbling on the web to an even larger audience,” Michael Buhr, General Manager of StumbleUpon said in a statement. “We are pleased with the feedback that we have gotten about the StumbleUpon Partner Program and the opportunity that it provides to both consumers and publishers.”

Whether or not a handful of partner sites will yield better results for StumbleUpon remains in doubt. But as the company’s executives pointed out in October when it started the Partner Program, it hopes to rapidly expand the Program and open it to all publishers as soon as possible.

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