How does StumbleUpon make money?

October 28, 2010 3:33 AM

How does StumbleUpon really work (as a business and as web service)?

I've been contacted by a StumbleUpon "biz dev" guy -- and I'm maybe being a bit paranoid. I'm working on a not-unpopular website, and the SU guy suggests a partnership of some kind. Is this some kind of "pay for traffic" scheme for protection money? If I don't pay up, will my traffic suddenly drop?

I'm not really a "Stumbler" myself, so I'm not entirely sure how it works. I suppose I should ask this question at WebmasterWorld or something, but I thought I'd ask here first -- just to see if anyone here could talk me down from my paranoia.

So does anyone here have any insights on StumbleUpon's business model? Or is there anyone who follows how SU's "recommendation algorithm" works?

Thanks!

posted by mhh5 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

In terms of making money, they just sell a certain percentage of 'stumbles' to advertisers. So when someone uses StumbleUpon, some of the sites that appear will be there because the owner paid to have their site crop up at a certain frequency for a given topic. The rest will be the usual things that random strangers have found and rated.

If you're already getting a certain amount of traffic from StumbleUpon, I doubt they're going to remove your site from their results just because you're not willing to pay money to appear more often in their results. It's probably just a matter of you deciding whether paid-for placement will benefit your site at all.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 4:58 AM on October 28, 2010

People using StumbleUpon pick certain topics they are interested in. So let's say you sell jewelry. If you pay for their service, they will show your website to a specific number of people who ask to see websites about jewelry.

If you don't pay for their service, then whether or not your site is shown to people depends on a few things. Someone has to initially add your site to their database, by going to your site and giving it a Thumbs Up. Then they will show the page to that person's friends. If those friends also give it a thumbs up, they will start showing it to more and more people. If the friends give it a thumbs down, or don't do anything, it will likely fall off the radar.

So by paying them, you're ensuring that it will be seen by people, whether they like it or not.
posted by MexicanYenta at 9:41 AM on October 28, 2010

Response by poster: Hmm. This business model seems like Yahoo's search engine back in the day when they would insert your site into the "organic" search results if you paid them enough.... which made for poor search results b/c you could effectively buy your way into good search result positions. I suppose StumbleUpon doesn't have this problem because the users are not expecting a "search result" but just some randomly-picked website.

Still, it surprises me that there isn't a Yelp-like suspicion that SU is messing with their stumbles in order to benefit their paying customers.... But maybe I'm just too paranoid.
posted by mhh5 at 12:11 AM on October 29, 2010