StumbleUpon Traffic is Worthless to Your Blog

Posted on 26. Aug, 2009 by Jeremiah Hoyet in Blogging, Traffic

I’m a big fan of the social network StumbleUpon, it’s gotten me through many boring nights when I just couldn’t find something interesting or productive to occupy my time. It’s also directed a staggering number of viewers to a lot of blogs that I have owned in the past.

Recently, someone browsing past this blog decided that my words were worth-while enough that they decided to share the blog post with the StumbleUpon community. While I greatly appreciate whoever it was that shared the page initially, I can’t help but realize how worthless StumbleUpon traffic is to my blog.

Traffic Spike That Has No Value

Traffic Spike From StumbleUpon

In my opinion, StumbleUpon just offers you a traffic spike, but that traffic doesn’t offer you any real value. The day that my blog post was submitted to StumbleUpon I experienced a pretty decent increase in traffic. A few days after being submitted, my blog traffic returned to normal as the number of people “stumbling across” my blog diminished (as you can see from the graph snippet to the left).

During the time StumbleUpon was actually sending traffic to my blog, I gain no new RSS subscribers, and had no new comments. Not to mention, there wasn’t an increase in interaction with the advertisements on my blog.

Why is StumbleUpon Traffic Worthless?

StumbleUpon isn’t like other social networks. Sure, there are thousands of people actively participating in the social network; finding, sharing, and rating content; but a large portion of the users turn to the social network as a fix to boredom. That means that for blogs like mine, which are a source of entertainment in general, StumbleUpon’s audience won’t enjoy what they find.

In a nutshell, the users of StumbleUpon have 4 qualities that aren’t well suited for my blog:

They probably aren’t looking for information about blogging.
They want to be entertained, not informed.
They are very quick to judge, and often don’t look deeper than the title of a page.
They don’t tend to stick around and interact.

Has StumbleUpon traffic ever been valuable to your blog?

Image by MatHampson

Tags: blog traffic, stumbleupon, stumbleupon traffic

10 Responses to “StumbleUpon Traffic is Worthless to Your Blog”

k00pa

27. Aug, 2009

Well… I got over 130k visitors in 2 days and got about 2 interviews about that success. + tons of links to my site. (Some from pretty big blogs)

So what I was of lots of links to my site and nice 130k visitor stats

http://pelikoira.net/random/awstats/ <- stats file
http://www.pelikoira.net/stumble <- the page that got the hit

Yes, they usually leave easily, but I have used woopra to track visitors and from 200 stumblers about 10 stops on the site for longer time.

So I would not say that it is totally worthless traffic.
Hesham

27. Aug, 2009

I think it depends on how powerful is your account on StumbleUpon !
bbrian017

27. Aug, 2009

I agree 100% with what you’re saying. I think Stumbleupon traffic is a waste of bandwidth and resources. The traffic never stays on your site and will never re visit the site. I’m a SEO and Marketing bloggers so they are very quick to leave my website.

I stumble for other people still when I’m logged in but I don’t go out of my way to be stumbled. You can get 5 hits from blogengage that would result in the same actions as 10,000 hits for Stumbleupon.
kathcom

27. Aug, 2009

I write humor (hopefully) so I like getting the StumbleUpon traffic. If my blog were monetized, I might not feel the same way.

If I were to scratch below the surface, I think I would find that I’m getting clicks from people who spend less than 5 seconds on my blog. I hope if they see something they don’t like that their judgment won’t extend to giving me a bad review.

Right now, SU traffic is good for my ego but as you point out, probably not much else.
b0ll0cks

27. Aug, 2009

I had the same experience. I recieved a ton of traffic no comments, and no feed increase. The traffic does help to boost your rankings in any directories you might belong to. A high ranking in directories is always nice and does give you a slight increase in more traffic.
Jeremiah Hoyet

27. Aug, 2009

@k00pa – The page was something with entertainment value, unlike most of this blog’s content, which is purely informative.

Great job though! I find that page absolutely hilarious!

@Hesham – All of your social networking accounts are powerful mate! I see you everywhere! :p

@kathcom – Exactly! SU users want to have a laugh! StumbleUpon is probably a great source of readers for your blog!

@Myself – I really need a comment system with threading :[
MichaelR

29. Aug, 2009

I really can not say because we only get little traffic from SU. But more or less I am agreeing with most of you guys, SU traffic is just that…traffic with little value.

Michael
Bill Bartmann

01. Sep, 2009

I’m so glad I found this site…Keep up the good work
Bob M.

05. Dec, 2009

I am an active stumbler and I must respectfully disagree with your opinion of stumblers. I have found and subscribed to rss feeds from several sites. The percentage of sites I stumble compared to the subscriptions is low because I have only so much time to read the feeds I like.

It may be that your sites stumble tags are bringing the wrong group of stumblers to your site and your content just doesn’t interest them. I would suggest refining your sites category and see if you can attract a more like mined group of stumblers.
Jeremiah Hoyet

10. Dec, 2009

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you, I’m having some “life issues” that have caused me to have a long lapse in online activity.

A few days ago this post got a good spike in traffic from StumbleUpon, and you were the only user to stop and leave a comment. That should tell you something. Not every StumbleUpon user is Stumble-happy and quick to leave, but I would feel comfortable saying that 95%+ are, as you can clearly see.