For those who don’t know, StumbleUpon is a great way to alleviate boredom. But this post isn’t going to be about what it is, or how fantastic it is at showing you interesting pages. This is more of a post regarding its unique marketing capabilities (let alone it being more viable for traffic than digg.com)

vs.

I’ll start with why I think Stumble is better than Digg. Firstly with Stumble, it only takes the submission of the site to be viewed by at least 150 to 200 people. While your site is still being shown to this subset of users, think of this as your submissions trial period. If during this time no one hits that “I like it!” button, then your site will fall off of Stumble never to be seen again. I believe this to be a better submission tool than diggs. With Digg, you must submit, then either hope your friends spot it and help, or that the traffic on your site is enough to provide promotion.

With digg there are so many more factors at play, they have their unique algorithm which unless you’ve seen the source code, its all just speculation and guess work on what makes a post go popular. All that is known is this…

“While we don’t disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy” – Kevin Rose (digg.com founder)

There are many issues with digg but I am not going to go into them, if you want to read more about that see this page which sums up digg criticism. StumbleUpon however operates what appears to be a much simpler algorithm, which I have been observing while creating this blog. As I wrote earlier, upon the initial submission of a page that site will be given approximately 200 views. In these 200, if anyone uses the “I like it!” button, that link is given another 200 views. So far I don’t believe there is a upper cap to this, as once you have viewed something on Stumble you aren’t ever shown it again so essentially if you have an interesting page for people to see, you could get exponential views over time.

However, there are some catches, so before you run off and start “discovering” all your blogs pages you’ll want to take this into consideration. During the “trial” period of the first 200 users, if you go and discover another site it will choose between the ones you submit and only send traffic to one of them. So you need to stagger your submissions in order for them all to be seen. Not only that you also need to pick carefully the main topic and tags you apply to your submissions so that they get viewed by the correct demographics and will contain a high chance they they click that magic button.

You should get my predictions on the number of hits if you use StumbleUpon with what it was intended for… Stumbling. If you just want traffic fast and think that Stumble is the key to that, look elsewhere, you need to invest time and take an active interest in its community and members to achieve guaranteed traffic. Signing up with an account and just discovering your own pages will get you no where.

So on reflection, the StumbleUpon algorithm isn’t as simple as it appears, but becomes simpler once you actively use their service. If you compare Digg to Stumble, the more you use Stumble the more weight you have, the more you use Digg the less weight you have. This essentially makes it harder and harder for links to be seen by the masses, especially since its user base is growing extremely fast. The posts in their “upcoming” sections just don’t get a look in as the sections get flooded with the same news.