Forget Google – StumbleUpon has becoming one of the biggest drivers of traffic to websites. The social discovery tool recently added its 10 millionth person to its roster of members, representing a 100 percent increase in membership since April 2008.
In fact, the site’s blog recently featured a post on “StumbleUpon by the Numbers,” revealing that the site is ranked number one among social media traffic sources in the US. The site has delivered 5.4 billion recommendations since April 2009 (and apparently half a billion of those were in March of this year, for whatever reason). The average member stumbles 25 times per day (the Stumble button can quite addicting), and there are over 100,000 StumbleUpon fans on Facebook. According to StatCounter, StumbleUpon delivers more traffic to websites than Twitter, Reddit, or Digg.
The 10 millionth user was celebrated relatively quietly, with a StumbleUpon employee simply typing some welcoming words on his profile. The company didn’t make a big deal of it, but it represents a fairly substantial number of members.
It’s been a year since E-bay sold off StumbleUpon, freeing up the website recommendation engine to become an independent startup. E-bay acquired the engine in 2007 for $75 million.
In March of this year, the site launched a new advertising system, which allowed advertisers to better monitor their ads. It included new metrics that allowed advertisers to track and understand the results of their campaigns. In otherwords, most of the changes weren’t really visible to the average user, but they helped out advertisers a bunch.
Indeed, StumbleUpon has made quite a few innovations and changes over the past few years. In June 2009, it launched its own URL shortening service Su.pr. It also simplified its homepage, and user interface. Its Discover tab allowed users to sort their Stumbling escapades by most recent stumbles from your friends, top rated stumbles, most shared stumbles, or sort by topic.
It’s not surprising that the tool has taken off in a big way. With such a massive sea of web out there, StumbleUpon offers users the ability to discover great sites with just the click of a button, and to rate them with just the click of one more button (a thumbs up or thumbs down). It’s that easy: two clicks. And simplicity seems to be the key to getting ahead online these days.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
Read other articles by Kaila Krayewski
