Giving a Thumbs Up to StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon used to have an audience score that seemed to rise and fall randomly. If more people visited your SU blog, it would usually bring the number up some, but other days it would go up when no one had visited. For several months, a friend and I would compare audience scores, trying to figure out what it meant and what was happening with it. The one thing we did determine was that getting on the Top Stumbler list wasn’t related to your Audience Score, since his score was always higher than mine, he had more fans than I had, and I was the one who made it on the list.

Tim Nash has written a wonderful article that finally solves (or at least sheds some light on) the mystery of Audience Scores and by doing so, he explains how to have the most impact as a stumbler. Part of this my friend and I had figured out, but some of it had me nodding my head and going, “Ah, so THAT’S how it works.”

A point from his post:

It is hard to weight which factor is most important when increasing audience score but the factors as I see them are:

• Number of fans
• Number of thumbs up and down you have given
• Stumble thumb bonus – increase to score based on number of thumbs received on a page.

This model means that the obvious technique to get a “power account” is to find more fans, thumb up loads of pages and start stumbles on pages you expect to be popular – sound familiar its pretty much the same on every social media site.

With the recent popularity of StumbleUpon, one thing I’ve noticed is that a LOT of people don’t seem to “get” how SU works. Stumblers with several pages of sites they’ve commented on won’t have thumbed up their own site…and sometimes they haven’t even thumbed up the pages they’re commenting on. Those thumbs on the SU Toolbar are important. They represent everything you’re interested in…and anything you aren’t. Giving a thumbs up to a good page increases the page’s value in SU’s AI’s eyes. So that page will get sent to more stumblers. As they thumb it up and add their own tags to it, it will be sent to even more, and so on and so forth.

Now, the thing that is death both to your audience score and to whatever site you’re thumbing, is having a page you discover get marked as spam by your visitors.

According to Tim:

Fred has realised stumbleupon can make him money so thumbs up his proxy site it gets a few visitors but 7 people thumb down the site and 2 marked it as spam. Fred audience score plummets (18 but has been marked by spam so temporarily has his score halved) so his score is now 9 poor Fred will have to work hard to regain his score.

He also has a good point about friends, “it is my belief it does penalise accounts that continue to stumble the
same things without being friends or at least one party being a fan.” I think it’s probably the idea of having fans that keeps you from being penalized, particularly since friends on SU are basically just mutual fans, and there doesn’t seem to be a bonus to being fans of a large number of people.

The one thing he mentions that I’m not totally sure about is the use of the “send to” button. I’ve seen some Top Stumblers use it to advantage, although admittedly that was a while back and SU may have changed the way it counts. Regardless, I still think sending a good site to a friend who you know will enjoy it is a great way to build and maintain friendships on SU. I just regret that there is no way to save the comments that get sent with a page recommendation.

Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon, Thumb Up, Stumblers

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