I Wouldn't Submit That to StumbleUpon

I have been using StumbleUpon for a few weeks and have realized some important considerations that you should take into account when submitting content to the service. While Digg, Netscape, and Reddit are socially driven news and content sites, StumbleUpon succeeds more in delivering content (i.e. media) than it does in serving important news items. The news items that I StumbleUpon are often old and outdated. For example, random stumbling right now served me pages from Feb 25th, 2007, Feb 15th, 2007, and Nov 10, 2003 among some more recent articles. While some opinion pieces transcend time, most news articles become irrelevant after a week or so. What I learned from this, and from my own voting habits on the content that was displayed to me is that photography, videos, humor, and other types non-temporal content generally tends to do better and has more of a chance of creating long-term traffic. This is a significant way in which StumbleUpon differs from other socially driven sites, as it has less to do with timely promotion of important content and more to do with giving interesting and fun content more exposure. For example, just look at the Wikipedia entry on the StumbleUpon,

StumbleUpon is a commercial web discovery service that integrates peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging. The Toolbar system automates the collection, distribution and review of web content within an intuitive social framework, providing users with a browsing experience that resembles "channel-surfing" the web.

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Sreejith, March 5, 2007

Well, Saleem, with what I know about Stumble Upon, I think pages about "Hacking" perform well. I remember getting 1000s of traffic from SU from my article on hacking the N70 (which I deleted due to some...ehem...difficulties).

I think SEO and Web Development won't perform good because people "stumble" for pass-time and not for serious reasons. So, make the content look really cool and you may get a bookmark. I don't think many of the stumblers read what they stumbled unless its "that" cool.

HMTKSteve, March 5, 2007

I agree. StumbleUpon is not for breaking news, it is for interesting tidbits you find around the web.

Zach Katkin, March 12, 2007

I would suggest that StumbleUpon update their algorithims and serve content that is stale (and time relevant) less often?

TJ, March 17, 2007

Interesting thought: We have all become extreme newsjunkies. Articles that were written 2-3 months ago still might still be very much valid. A date stamp doesn't prove much to me. Although old articles (more than 1 year old) I no longer regularly read. Can you imagine throwing away your book collection because it was printed 2-3 years ago?

GramBorder, March 19, 2007