Have you ever wondered what it takes to become a ‘Top Stumbler’ at StumbleUpon?
Glen Allsopp has done some great analysis on StumbleUpon’s Top 50 Stumblers.
Some of the key take home ‘averages’ that might be worth knowing if you’re looking to increase your StumbleUpon status:
- Average length of membership at SU – 18 months
- Average number of pages ‘liked’ – 12,805
- Average number of videos ‘liked’ – 513
- Average number of photos ‘liked’ – 1086
That’s a lot of stumbling! It is worth noting that these are averages and the spread of results was much much wider (full details at Glen’s post). The only thing missing from the analysis that I’d have been curious about would be how many fans each of the top 50 had.
I’m one of the Top Stumblers and the third fastest to reach that status (5 months, around 1500 Thumbs Up). Glenn chatted to me briefly about it.
I’m not sure how some people see Top Stumblers, but I’ve found the position to have very little influence. It certainly doesn’t send my own site mountains of traffic. I don’t even have more than 30 fans. I’m not even sure how I became a Top Stumbler so quickly…
The only real change I’ve noticed is more messages from people asking me to ‘Like’ their site.
Someone else mentioned the fans factor, I guess it should have been something I considered and something I will add in a revision at a later date
Thanks for the link Darren :)
I hope you don’t forget about me when you become famous :) Congratulations on making it to problogger.
haha Carl don’t worry, I will never become famous. I just want to help people understand Social Media / SEO and share what I learn on the way!
thanks for the analysis Glen. I’m surprised that fans don’t seem to impact it that much. It’d be fascinating to see how much impact all the different elements have on their algorithm.
I definitely don’t have those stats but I’m trying to get more and more into the habit of “uping” the pages I find from other places, because I appreciate people doing the same on my website ;)
I’ve clicked on many the ‘top stumblers’ and found that a few have been inactive for a while, not a stumbler for long, few reviews, or a seemingly small amount of stumbles.
I’ve been curious about what kind of formula determines ‘top’ ranking? 12,000 pages? 1100 Photos? 500 videos? That’s a LOT of thumbs-up!!
A friend of mine is a top stumbler as well, and she also says it has little power attached to it.
She was thinking of a way to devise a charging system for stumbling and liking sites!
While it sounds difficult, I’m sure it could be done.
Darren, found the average fans per Top 50 SU user. Emailed you the numbers.
The term fans is a little misleading IME. Sometimes people will add you because they like the pages you stumble, but mostly it seems to be the equivalent of a ‘friend’ on any other site. People message you and ask to be their friend, etc.
If you’re proactive about making friends, you’ll get a lot of ‘fans’, otherwise you just have to wait for people to come to you.
Interesting post. I like what Chris said in the first comment though, about not being sure what being a “top stumbler” really means. Does it just mean you spend a lot of time surfing the web?
From the little I know about “Stumble Upon”, it sounds like if you are a top stumbler, you just get lots of requests to visit certain websites (also as Chris pointed out).
But I’m wary of such sites. I tried playing around with Digg for a while and quickly became bored with it. These sites appear to be designed in a way so just a few people hold the most influence. But I could be wrong.
About 2 1/2 years ago, I was one of the “top stumblers.” I spent a lot of time stumbling and finding new websites to share when I should have been doing something else. When I stopped spending so much time at it, it wasn’t long before I dropped out of that “elite” group.
I’m still active at StumbleUpon and I spend some time there on occasion looking at other peoples’ stumble blogs and doing a little stumbling of my own.
Having been there and done that, I don’t place a lot of importance in the top stumbler rankings.
My stumble pages are at http://skedaddle.stumbleupon.com/
I don’t like this idea of paying a lot of attention to Top anything unless there’s something substantial to it. What really matter in my mind is how you cultivate and take care of your own site. I use StumbleUpon and I like it but I find it more helpful to my own blogs to find interesting sites there to showcase and blog about. Every now and then I look for bloggers and website owners I stumble across who might be interested in exchanging links.
It can be very easy to just waste a lot of time at sites like that. And I agree with Brad V. A lot of these sites eventually develop a small group at the top that wield a lot of influence.
It’s even worth the time the time doing that? That is just way too much if you ask me.
Ah – the dark side of the blogosphere. We’re running a real risk of spoiling a good tool (Stumbleupon). It’s a great tool for exploring the web – ‘we only know what we know’.
Recently, I seem to observe a relative decline in the quality of stumbles. Where one could have been amazed before with every second or third stumble, this is no longer the case.
Incidentally, some mainstream bloggers have ‘discovered’ stumble, and advocate its use as a site promotion tool.
I wonder whether above 2 developments are related.
I guess the biggest drawback to being a top stumbler is that you get a lot of people asking you to stumble their sites. Great job Glen.
I agree with you Brown,, but do they really stumble for those people? And yeah, before when I used to stumble I would see interesting sites on most of my stumbles, but now I’m getting very few good results.
I became a top stumbler quite by accident some time ago, and I have remained there not because I am trying to be a top stumbler but rather because I’m just surfing like I normally do… that is, 1. finding content that is interesting to me, 2. being the FIRST one to discover it and thumb it up, and then 3. other people also in turn view it and give it a thumbs up too. (#3. is key in the whole thing.) The more sites YOU discover and other people thumb up = higher rankings on Stumble. But the key is that you can’t just discover any old thing, it has to be stuff people would actually give a thumbs up to. So that is why I only thumb up things I personally like!
As for extra pull, other people here haven’t noticed any – and neither have I, except I have my avatar on the “TOP STUMBLER” page – IF that is a perk. The only change as Chris said, is people emailing you asking you to thumb up their their sites, and in my case I got a lot more email in general from creepy guys wanting to hook up me. But that is a universal problem for all women I think! :)
i become a stumbler to increase traffic and ranking in search engine.
i actually thumbs up my own blog page. and that will increase traffic on those blog; immediately.
digg is also good to increase traffic to blog immediately.
Does being a top stumbler have any bearing on how that site shows up?