Years ago, when Facebook was still in it’s infancy and Twitter was unheard of, there was Stumbleupon. It grew and grew and pretty soon, Stumbleupon was the place to go if you want free and fast traffic. A stumble by a power stumbler can bring in hundreds of hits within an hour and if the stumble goes viral, you will see traffic coming in fast and furious for the rest of the day or the week.
Then Facebook and Twitter made their emergence and all attention began shifting to these two emerging entities. It became cool to have a Facebook and a Twitter account and everyone who has an online presence has a Facebook name and a Twitter name. Stumbleupon began losing much of it’s popularity. People stopped stumbling. They went re-tweeting instead. Post that gets stumbled do not enjoy the sudden traffic surge anymore. For some reason, Stumblers have stopped showing the kind of interest that was present a couple of years ago.
In all fairness, Stumbleupon is different from Facebook or Twitter. While Stumbleupon focused more on publicizing a site with their users recommending the site to others by way pf ‘Stumbling’ it, Facebook and Twitter are more of a socializing site where users gets to know friends and share opinions of everything under the Sun. It was much later when they grew to such enormous proportions that people stated to take advantage of the traffic that these two giant portals are getting.
Stumbleupon, is by no means a dwarf when compared to Facebbok or Twitter. Their homepgae boasts the number of registered users as near to 10 and a half million. That is a respectable figure though no one knows for sure how many of those are active Stumblers.
Over the years, Stumbleupon has surprisingly managed to stay rather ‘clean’. It is hard to game them like Twitter where you will get tons of spammy tweets and gets followed by tons snake-oil salesman trying to make a fast buck. Maybe it is because Stumbleupon do not provide much avenue for spammers or Internet marketers to play their game.
For one, Stumbleupon do not encourage self promotion. It is considered a taboo to stumble your own post or your own site and if you do that often enough, you will get banned. Even though, much of the time, they will be lenient and let you off the hook if you do not make a habit out of it, your self stumbles will more often than not yield no hits.
Two, Stumblers hates blogs with tons of Ads or are spammy in nature. If they land on such blog, they will will give you a thumb down and a negative review. If a site gets enough of those, they will eventually be left in the cold and no amount of stumbling will be enough to bring it back to life.
Frankly, I have never mastered the full usage of Stumbleupon. All I did was stumble whatever I liked and hope others will stumble me back. I am sure there is more to it than that to fully realize the true potential of Stumbleupon.
In view of that, and after seeing some my post being stumbled multiple times recently but receiving no hits whatsoever, I have decided to re-install the Stumbleupon Toolbar on my browser and re-activate my stumbling activities. It has been more than a year since I last stumbled some. Lets see if some of it’s past glory remains. Of course, to help me on my mission, you too can start stumbling by clicking on that Stumbleupon button on the left side of this post.
Yea, I’m a whore. Sue me.
