In the last few months I’ve seen more and more bloggers getting excited about Stumbleupon and adding “stumble” buttons to their posts in order to encourage their visitors to stumble their latest entries.
While it’s nice to see your traffic stats go up I’ve often wondered if there’s any value to traffic from sites like Stumbleupon.
On Thursday evening I spent some time adding several of the recent posts on Odd Planet to Thoof. The posts that I’ve added to Thoof in the past have always brought in new traffic to my sites.
What’s more, the people who’ve decided to visit one of my sites after seeing the posts summary on Thoof have often taken the time to stop and leave a comment on the post. Some have also enjoyed the posts enough to add them to Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmark sites.
The great thing about Digg, Thoof and other social bookmark sites is that when people visit those sites they pick and choose what websites they visit. On the other hand when someone uses StumbleUpon they are taken to new sites, ones they may or may not want to visit. I suspect that most people quickly visit site to site when they stumble, not stopping to explore the site they are on at all.
To prove my point – some of the posts that I added to Thoof on Thursday night have turned out to be quite popular on Thoof. Popular enough to bring in about 500 new visitors in the last two days. Several of these new visitors added the posts to social bookmarking sites, dugg the post and yes a few stumbled the posts too.
The stumbles resulted in more than 4,500 stumbles for ONE Odd Planet post yesterday.
4,500 visits. That’s amazing isn’t it? Shouldn’t I be happy about that?
While it’s possible that some of the stumblers might have bookmarked the site yesterday for future visits or added it to their favorite social bookmarking site I suspect most looked at the funny picture that’s posted, had a little laugh and moved on.
None of the stumblers stopped to leave a comment. This particular post was published on October 3rd and the last comment left on the post is October 6th – well before all this stumbling occurred. Yet the posts that were very popular on Thoof got quite a few new comments and hopefully some of the new Thoof visitors will return.
I’ve monetized Odd Planet with Google Adsense. This site usually does ok with Google Adsense. It doesn’t make a lot of money each day, but I’d say it usually averages a dollar or two. Yesterday the site had more than 4,500 visitors. Do you know how much I made on Google Adsense on that site yesterday? 34 cents. Uh huh. Some of my other sites that only had 100 visitors on Saturday made quite a bit more than that.
This only re-enforces my opinion that StumbleUpon traffic is hit and run traffic.
My other worry is that Google, who doesn’t like sites that create “false impressions” of their ads, could see all this hit and run traffic as an effort to increase ad impressions and end up banning my account. I’m actually glad that there wasn’t a huge increase in Google Adsense clicks as it might have raised Google’s suspicion.
At this point I think I’d much rather have an extra hundred or so visitors to a post from a site like Thoof or Digg where people have chosen to visit the post on their own rather than thousands of empty hits from StumbleUpon.
Since I run several websites and blogs on my hosting account I worry about getting too much traffic too. I’ve had to change hosts twice so far this year and the next move will probably be an upgrade to VPS hosting. You can read about my hosting problems and CPU resource over usage on The WebFiles. A huge increase in extra traffic – sometimes 6 hits per minute on the post I’ve been discussing could be the final straw that causes my host to shut my account down. If it was real traffic I’d deal with it ok, but to worry about my hosting account over empty traffic – no way.
The stumbling is still going strong. Looking at the Statcounter Stats for Odd Planet there’s been 1,304 page loads in the last 3 hours and forty five minutes (yes it’s 3:45 am) and the majority of those page loads were StumbleUpon visitors.
Once all the stumbling stops I’ll keep an eye on the site to see if the traffic has increased a little bit over it’s past daily average. Of course since a few posts were popular on several of the sites I’ve mentioned in the last few days I may have trouble deciding which site caused a slight increase (return visitors) in the average traffic once all of this dies down.
Have you had some of your posts become popular on StumbleUpon, Digg, Thoof or a social bookmarking site? If you have, have you analyzed the traffic from those sites to see if you gained any benefit from the increase in visitors at all?
It’s nice to see a post about Stumbleupon with some thought behind it. In the early days I used it regularly under a different name to the one I currently employ.
I’m always grateful to those who feel my posts worthy of stumbling, but, it has to be said, all it often seems to provide is a brief but impressive surge in hits as stumblers click quickly through on their way to the next 2 second visit.
New eyes on your site are always good I suppose, but the quality of SU traffic is, as you say, debatable, much like a traditional traffic exchange, despite the loosely “targeted” theory. After the brief euphoria of a huge percentage increase in daily traffic, I find myself usually little in the way of new contributors or regular readers.
That being said, I think Stumbleupon is still worthy of our time and effort as another traffic channel, just not as wonderful as people sometimes claim.
I stumbled on this post and commented too 😉
I hear you though, sometimes its just a quick transient visit. Thats been my experience with SU too. Still, if you get one good comment or one new subscriber then its a good thing right?
Social bookmarking traffic doesn’t convert. It’s good for getting backlinks, however. You’d have to look elsewhere for ‘paying customers’.
I have had some pages get stumbled with quite huge spikes in traffic. I very all traffic that is real people clicking on real links worthwhile. Yes it is much less likely to get the type of “conversion” (RSS subscribers say) for some random link than say a link in a blog post on a blog that is in your market segment. But I think my sites are good at what they do – a decent percentage of people that come that want that type of info will come back. I am happy to have surges of traffic from Stubble Upon or anywhere else. I’ll gladly upgrade my hosting account to support real live people visiting my sites.
Stumbleupon doesn’t bring exclusively empty visits (for instance, I stumbled on this site) but the majority of them certainly are. Although I’m surprised that Digg is any better.
I suppose the main difference is the big Stumble! button in the toolbar, ready to take you to another site as soon as you’re finished with this one. It’s so easy to click when compared to clicking the back button or closing the tab you opened for the new site and finding the old tab with Digg in it again.
Of course, the other main thing would be the number of Digg users (and I’m sure this applies to Slashdot and others just as well) who never click through to your site. It’s probably even greater than the number of Stumbleupon users but you don’t see them because they never hit your site and they never even see your advertising.
…and they never cause you any bandwidth or CPU load.
The other thing that makes Stumbleupon different from the others from a webmaster’s perspective is that the hits are slower, but they just keep coming. Digg loves your blog post for the first day it’s up but a Digging rarely lasts more than a day. Stumbleupon won’t send you 150,000 visitors in a day (I’ve seen that from Digg) but it will keep sending 5,000 every day for a month or two.
Interesting post and great points from Dave.
I agree that it can be frustrating to get that much traffic and not see great conversion… But also… even if the Stumbleupon traffic isn’t really “paying out” immediately, you could also ask “why not”? It obviously isn’t hurting a site to get traffic from Stumbleupon, and any traffic at all does help with brand awareness. So even if the traffic doesn’t convert as well as traffic from other sources, it can still benefit in some way, and is worth getting. After all, all it takes is clicking on the Stumbleupon thumbs up. 🙂
My experiences with Stumbleupon are very similar. Just think about how someone uses Stumbleupon; they click on the Stumble! button, see a new website, SCAN! the post (in 99%) and either give it a thumbs up or down AND move to the next Stumble.
People who use Stumbleupon are very bored. 😉 They need the fix of a new website every few seconds.
So no real benefits from Stumblers except very few exceptions.
I have been using stumbleupon as a great timepass, as I have never been able to get enough traffic on my blogs from them.
Good writing. I agree. I’ve a couple of posts that is very popular on Stumbleupon now. I’m getting worried that Stumbleupon soon has taken over the feared “Digg effect”. (I actually have Digg referrers stopped by my .htaccess file even though I also have a plugin that is said to stop this kind of effect too)
I find no use for this kind of masses of visitors. It’s too few of them that’s giving something back, they’re only wasting my bandwidth.
I’ve also been tossing back and forth with the thought of installing a social bookmarking plugin for WP or not, so far the not-side has won 😉
I myself do have stumbleupon buttons on my blog. I have got a good decent response as far as traffic is concerned. However I am not too sure if this is more than enough or not.
I think it can be frustrating get so much traffic, have seen great changes