Last Updated on April 20, 2020

Three months ago I had a discovery that changed this blog’s traffic in an unexpected way: I dicovered StumbleUpon, I signed in, and then I submitted some of my best pages there, to see what happens. I was amazed to see how many people visited my pages, how many friends I’ve got in a very short time, and how many things I learned from other people’s pages.
Briefly, StumbleUpon is a social network which now has more than 1 million members, and which is different than other social sites I had met so far. You download and install a toolbar, then, when surfing the net, if you like a page and you want to share it with the community, you press a button (you stumble the page), and the page goes into the StumbleUpon circuit. On the toolbar, you also have the Stumble button, which, once pressed, shows you pages stumbled by other members.

September06I signed in with StumbleUpon in the beginning of September. Look at my statistics for September: almost 71% of my traffic came from StumbleUpon! It is true that one of my posts made it to the Buzz! Section (a sort of Digg’s front page) and this generated a significant amount of traffic, not only in the few days when it was in the Buzz!, but even three months after that, I still see a lot of traffic coming to that page.

October06In October, one of my posts got farked (some of you may know what this means for the traffic; I got about 20000 visitors in the first 10 hours or so, and there could have been more if the server had not crashed for a while). Although Fark accounted for 67% of October’s traffic, yet StumbleUpon had an honorable share of almost 18%.

November06November was a normal month, as I did not have so much time to write new content for my blog, so I put here these figures for comparison: you can see that StumbleUpon almost equals Google in the amount of traffic sent to the site (I get about 150-200 daily uniques from Google, the site being only 4 months old).

But most important of all, I made a few good friends on StumbleUpon, and I even found one of my former colleagues I did not hear from since 12 years ago.

Did anybody of you have similar experiences with StumbleUpon or with other social places? Please let us know, so we can all benefit from your learnings.