Mark Evans

StumbleUp: Dine and Dash Surfing

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with StumbleUpon as a tool to expose my blogs to a wider audience.

Here’s the early verdict: It generates lots of traffic but little of it is sticky judging by how pageviews return to “normal” when a post isn’t promoted on SU, and how the number of RSS subscribers has barely budged. Clearly, people are looking (or stumbling) at my blogs but not stopping before they quickly stumble on to the next Web site.

In other words, StumbleUpon is the dine and dash of the Web as opposed to an effective/useful tool to drive traffic.

Given how people use StumbleUpon, I shouldn’t be that surprised but you’d think that some of the traffic that StumbleUpon generates would translate into more readers. Maybe StumbleUpon is the ultimate online remote control Web for people with short-attention spans. See a new Web site - boom - on to the next one, and so it goes.

So what is StumbleUpon’s value proposition and value? If people are doing rapid-fire clicking, how does StumbleUpon sell the concept of people buying placement/exposure? For some Web sites, it must be an effective marketing tool but, sadly, not for me.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, StumbleUpon