23 Jun The Rise of StumbleUpon and the Necessity of Kittens
Digg.com is so 2008.
Also, here’s a picture of two kittens. Stay tuned for another.
This post was originally going to be about why our favorite (or maybe not-so-favorite) social bookmarking sites seem to be falling to Facebook and Twitter shares, but when I did my research, I found something interesting. While Reddit remains not-so-well-read and Digg declines, visits to StumbleUpon are shooting through the roof.
While Digg seems to be recovering from a recent dip, its site traffic is still down by 19% from this time last year. StumbleUpon, on the other hand, is up by 180%. Why? Is this just a fad? Is StumbleUpon suddenly the “cooler” way to find random crap on the net? Maybe it’s the web bar. I do like the web bar. It sits above your tabs and lets you stumble at will. It’s like a remote that surfs hundreds of millions of channels, with no commercials.
StumbleUpon is the instant gratification tool of social bookmarking. In fact, it’s so instant that you don’t even know where your browser is going until it gets there. You sign up for the site and check off a few basic interests (like “literature,” “writing,” or “Europe,” for random instance), and then you stumble. Like what you find, or not? Thumbs up or thumbs down and keep going. Content with more “likes” is more frequently passed on to other users, so the more people that stumble, the more refined the tool becomes.
Its unique monthly visitor count still pales in comparison to its social networking counterparts (i.e. Facebook). But if this rate of growth continues, StumbleUpon is going to become a significant traffic source over the next year or so (in April, TechCrunch reported that the site may be sending out more traffic than Twitter). The fact that users don’t know where they’re going until they arrive offers a unique advantage over other social bookmarking sites. No “book by its cover” judgment here, simply after-the-fact peer-to-peer reviews.
If someone “stumbles” on to your site, then you’ve already gotten the click-through (an act for which we spend thousands on Facebook ads). Now all you need is awesome content to keep people intrigued and encourage them to come back. No, it’s not as easy as it sounds (why do you think I included the kittens?), but at least one step is taken out of the equation.
Speaking of kittens, I’m keeping my word:
Of course I don’t really recommend using adorable non sequiturs to secure higher time-on-site stats. The kittens represent the increasing necessity for attention-grabbing writing, engagement, and design on blogs and sites. Not that these factors were ever not important, but now that a channel-surfing site is about to become the most popular in the social bookmarking niche, readers are bound to stumble away from content as quickly as they stumble upon it.
