Are Webmasters / Internet Marketers ruining StumbleUpon?
Glen Allsopp / 
5 Comments / 
December 20th, 2007 / 
Subscribe via RSS
When I created my post about the top 50 stumbleupon users, I never expected it to received the level of success that it did, and even though it’s been live for quite a while, one of the most recent commentors was someone I really respect on StumbleUpon so I decided to get in touch with her, caile-girl.
One message she sent really struck me, and I asked for her permission before posting it here, as follows:
i realize i’m not a big favorite of marketers, traffic staticians and SEO bloggers. i’m quite outspoken and a bit annoyed, obviously, at all the dissection going on regarding SU and its traffic-generating possibilities. i’m also aware that with growth comes commercialism and all its necessary evils.
i guess i feel like i’m on some crusade to preserve the integrity of why the forum is even here, but i know it’s a lost cause and i’ll eventually move on, like most of the more idealistic veterans, and leave the “new” SU to all the marketers.
nothing wrong with marketing. i’m just sad seeing all the misrepresentation and the fact that something i’ve spent two years doing nearly daily for the fun of it (and for the learning experience) is no longer much fun anymore and i kind of resent the intrusion of those who have other ideas for how to exploit it.
however, times change and people have to make money and no one (especially me!) likes working in a cubicle for someone else’s gain, so i understand why this is happening, even if i don’t like it.
From this I can clearly sense her frustration and relate to why she might be feeling like she does. There is a lot of ‘manipulation’ that is used on one of my favourite sites but I want to make some comments that I would rather do in public to help defend what people like myself do.
I will state that I offer internet marketing services, and sometimes we use StumbleUpon to help drive traffic to our clients, both free and paid.
- Traffic Generating Possibilities - It’s true that people like to talk about the mass amounts of traffic that StumbleUpon can bring, this is because there are so few resources that can do this that people like to try and maximise it for everything that they can. Companies like us, will only submit the content and let the community to decide, if people like the content (which we have hopefully created to be good) they will give it a thumbs-up, if they don’t they will give it a thumbs down. This to me is no different than submitting a general article on the site of which we have no relation (which we of course do as well).
- Leaving the ‘new’ SU to Marketers - As I said earlier, I accept that there are people out there just manipulating the site, just check the freebies section on Digitalpoint and this will become clear. However not all internet marketers are there to try and make SU a bad place or just utilise it for traffic. Just like I use Digg majorly for finding interesting news, I use stumbleupon to discover new and hot content in the internet marketing niche or whatever I have a ‘craving’ for at a certain time.
- Resent those exploiting it - So do I, I hate it when I see crappy websites getting 50+ stumbles via Digitalpoint and then report back to say they received thousands of visitors. Even if people didn’t like it there just won’t have been enough thumbs down to counteract the benefits that people are receiving. Maybe this is a flaw with StumbleUpon in the sense that they havn’t found a way to get around this? I’m already seeing emails everyday from people sharing links with me on Mixx, it’s only a matter of time before the community becomes less friendly and the marketing does take over unless they can counteract it as well as, or better than digg.
In Conclusion…
There is some clear manipulation of StumbleUpon as highlighted earlier, but internet marketing companies aren’t necessarily the people to blame for these problems. If people can find ways to get more out of a system by manipulative tactics they probably will, but as mentioned maybe that’s a flaw in the SU system and something they should learn how to address. I too don’t like seeing the spam that gets shown on these sites but it certainly doesn’t lead me to give up and not expect things to change for the better.
What do you think?
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our
RSS feed?
This is a good post! I thought of it also !
I am quilty of adding numeroes links also ! But it works, it brings in extra hundreds of traffic!
SU has to do something about it
She has some very valid points and I can understand why a long-time user could be frustrated, but I certainly see your points as well. One thing that I don’t think you mentioned here, anyone can buy traffic from SU. If they’re selling traffic, to me that’s the same as a marketer using SU to promote something for a client. Of course the difference is who is being paid, SU or a marketer. But I see it as a similar result for the SU user surfing random sites.
I spam all the time but haven’t found an automated tool to do it with SU so it really hasn’t been worth my time to bother with
Good points tho.
G-Man
I stumble around a bit and stumble interesting (to me) content. I gave this site a thumbs-up and I gave James Brausch a thumbs-up. If people don’t agree with me, that’s cool. Everything is change. When all the blog entries are hard-sell marketing, I usually just move on rather than thumbs-down-ing.