Stumbleupon was one of the first social sites that I used, it’s been around so long, most people couldn’t have told you it was classed as a social site until the Web2.0/Myspace/Facebook era came into effect.
Stumbleupon started off as a way to “stumble upon” fun and interesting websites submitted by it’s users. As the years have passed and the social aspect of media has come to the fore, users have been able to recommend links to each other, communicate via the site and of course has attracted a lot of self marketers.
I won’t lie to you, I submitted a few of my most popular articles to see if it would bring in a new user base who wanted to read my content, it was shameless self promotion. Did it work? Yes.
I have submitted the same sites to Digg and to Mixx, these sites heavily relying on people to find my article, take the time to read it and then decide whether it was worth a vote. These sites had driven no more than 30 unique hits to my website.
Below is a report from the last month from my Google Analytics:
To put this in perspective, I only submitted links to Stumbleupon this week. The 28 hits from Mixx are based on three submissions over a monthly period. The sheer number of people that have “stumbled” on this site have produced the one comment and a rise in 4 RSS subscribers, I can only say thankyou to the people who found my content interesting.
I will not submit every blog post on this site, I have only submitted a few pages that would genuinely interest a viewer. Stumbleupon to me is a fair and useful way of finding content, it brings back the element of chance that people can find my submissions and vote on them from their toolbar. I will continue to promote Mixx as I would rather promote good content than my own, but Stumbeupon does bring interesting sites to you….fast.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Interesting site.. I had heard about this a year or two ago, but never eally took a shine to it…Maybe it’s worth checking out…
I do have to say however, my blog is number 7
haha.
January 22nd, 2008 at 7:48 am
I used StumbleUpon absolutely ages ago, but it never made it’s way in to my fav apps collection. Since then, I’ve made a move to Mac, so I’ll see if it works on Firefox on OS X and give it another punt. I’m having crazy ideas about setting aside 10 minutes each day just to check out something random from across the Web.
Just out of interest, how did the community at SU handle your submissions? I know the people over at Digg can be a bit negative about self-submissions. Would be interesting to know how the other voting sites feel about it.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:11 am
Neil, thanks for your comment.
The community seemed quite accepting actually, I didn’t want to Spam with all my blog posts, focusing on a few that received a bit of traffic from my blog already.
I only really came back to SU because of the hype surrounding it, I had left Digg with it’s fixation on Apple and fanboys, headed to Mixx where the community rocks and SU kind of came up from out the blue (again) and I gave it a go.
Perhaps the randomness of SU keeps people interested, you never quite know what you are going to see when you click “Stumble”.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Great - I might try submitting something to SU as an experiment. As a company, it’s a huge success story, so it would be good to understand the user experience anyway!