OpenJason » stumble http://www.openjason.com Weblog of all things Open Source, Web 2.0, Joomla!, and more... Fri, 18 Mar 2011 04:54:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The Killer Tool that will Kill StumbleUpon http://www.openjason.com/2009/03/14/the-killer-tool-that-will-kill-stumbleupon/ http://www.openjason.com/2009/03/14/the-killer-tool-that-will-kill-stumbleupon/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:12:06 +0000 Jason http://www.openjason.com/?p=339 StumbleUpon is definitely one of the better social media sites around. They’ve created an extremely loyal audience and continue to grow…. even through their ups and downs. SU seems to go through identity crises from time to time, but in my opinion, that’s good… it means they’re always looking to improve.

Stumble-ShareThe latest tool that SU released enhances the way you share your stumbles with your friends and followers. As opposed to sharing your site on a one-at-a-time basis, you can now send to everyone with a single click. This is any social marketers dream… assuming they’ve done a good job gaining friends and followers. The new stumble-blasting tool just might give them an edge that’s second to none… not even Twitter.

Is that going to happen… not likely. The most likely end-result of this initiative is the demise of StumbleUpon. We all just might be taking our last stumbles… unfortunately.

Here’s why:

Lost User-Loyalty: It’s easy to jump behind the keyboard and get a few stumbles in. With this new tool, it’s not that easy. We will be required to click through a bunch of “made-for-adsense” sites or blogs that pertain nothing to our interests. Spam-Upon: Just today I was sent well over 50 stumbles which was/is very frustrating. Additional to those 50+ clicks I had to go through, I had to shuffle through 50+ emails about the same stumbles. We can only expect to see an increase on this… as the SU tool was recently released, not everyone has caught on yet. One might argue that we just need to stop following these stumble-spammers… True, but who has time to do that?

Lost Advertising Revenue: Surely the folks at SU realized that this initiative will only decrease their advertising sales… How? Simple. All sponsored stumbles will now be sitting behind spammed stumbles… This posses a problem as it’ll take longer for sponsored stumbles to get served. Additionally, with the loss of user-loyalty, there will be a decrease in the number of times the ‘stumble’ button gets clicked, therefore the sponsored stumbles never makes it to some users.
StumbleUpon might also realize a drop in the amount of advertisers. Their advertising modalities will no longer carry the same value because the ads are second to spammed stumbles. For many advertisers, the NEED to advertise through SU will be eliminated.

I really hope I’m wrong about this stuff… Thoughts?

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