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Hey, I thumbed up a page and no one else even looked at it. What gives?

I have a post from a few months ago that only has a couple thumbs up, but it still brings in traffic. I also have a more recent one that has around ten thumbs up, and it’s not bringing in any traffic to speak of. Any idea what’s going on?

I’ve heard you can get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, but haven’t seen any of it. How does it work?

Do any of these questions sound familiar?

I think we’ve all wondered about this. Sometimes giving a page a thumb up seems to make a big difference. The page you discover and thumb up suddenly makes it to the Buzz and it seems like everyone is looking at it now.

Another page that seems just as likely to be popular doesn’t do anything after you thumb it up. What’s going on?

StumbleUpon’s Audience Score

StumbleUpon uses a number called Audience Score. It wasn’t that long ago that you could see your own audience score and see how you were doing. A new stumbler will likely have a low score. An experience stumbler could have a score over 1000.

It wasn’t until a friend, Allan Cockerill, told me how within a few minutes of my discovering one of his pages, he had a number of stumblers visit, that I realized once again, that I was hearing about something happen that I’d guessed at (the importance of the score), but never knew for sure.

I’ve talked before about being on the Top Stumbler’s list. It’s a popular list and something a lot people try to get on. But there is another type of Top Stumbler who, in my opinion, is more important. This is a stumbler with a high audience score.

On StumbleUpon, all thumbs are not created equal.

I guess you could relate it to real life. Some people have weak thumbs and some are strong.

A thumbs up from a stumbler with a high audience score will put your page in front of a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that they will like it, but people with strong scores are more likely to be suggesting sites that others will like.

A thumbs up from a stumbler with a low score won’t put the page in front of many people. Even if ten people give it a thumbs up, if all of them have weak scores, the page still won’t pull in a lot of views.

One problem that “Stumble groups” have is that unless you are get some high scoring stumblers in the group, it takes a lot of people to make a post popular enough to pull much weight outside of the group.

So what makes for a high Audience Score?

No one knows for certain. The best explanation I’ve found came from Tim Nash on Venture Skills, back in September.

Our user lets call him Fred has an audience score of 10 he goes along and starts a new stumble at a site he has never visited it gets a couple of hundred visits and 3 thumbs up Fred gains a point to his audience score for thumbing something up +a further bonus because others liked his stumble so fred now has an audience score of 13 Fred is really impressed that so many visitors came to his site so he thumbed up another page, even with his increased score it didn’t do so well and only 2 people thumbed it up and 2 thumbed it down! His score is now 14 (increased for thumbing up – no bonus ) Fred tries a different domain it does well and 10 people thumb it up his score goes up to 25, 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.

I discussed this article more fully back in September.

So if the Audience Scores aren’t available anymore, how can you tell if someone has a high score?

You can always try to get someone particular to thumb up a blog post for you, and count how many visitors you get within a certain time frame afterwards, but I really wouldn’t recommend that approach. Many of the more active stumblers consider any request to thumb up a site as spam. You may or may not get reported for it, but you’re not likely to make many friends (or influence many people) that way.

This idea is only a theory, but if you do a search for a particular stumbler, you’ll probably see stars beside their name. StumbleUpon rates sites (including your SU pages) with up to five stars, five being the best sites. On the Help page, it says that the stars denote the quality of the site. Taking that to a logical conclusion, stars should denote the quality of a stumbler…ie, their Audience Score. In order to see the stars, make sure that you have “Highlight recommended search results” turned on from your toolbar and do a search on any major search engine.

I do need to offer one word of warning when using this method. Even if a stumbler has 4 or 5 stars, I would recommend checking to see that they have a decent number of reviews and friends.

A final note

Writing reviews doesn’t seem to affect StumbleUpon’s scoring system in any way that I’ve noticed. But, especially with the Recent Reviews page, one thing that writing a review has the potential to do is to get the page out in front of others who might not see it otherwise.
If you’re fairly new to StumbleUpon and have a few friends, then anytime a page is important to you, don’t just stumble it, write a review about it. Your friends might not stumble on your page, but there’s a decent chance they will see the review.

A year or so ago, I was totally focused on becoming Top Stumbler. I was in the third position, behind two veteran stumblers, Wiggy (who has since left StumbleUpon) and Starspirit (who has been one of the very top stumblers as long as I have been on SU).

Thanks to a friend who noticed I was getting too caught up in being at the top of the list, and called me on it, I seriously cut back on my Stumbling activity for a while, and when I came back to StumbleUpon, I noticed I was having fun with it again, instead of stressing about always finding good articles to post.

So, here are my top 5 reasons you might not want to push to be Top Stumbler:

It doesn’t really bring you that much more real StumbleUpon traffic. It might bring visitors from outside SU, but it doesn’t bring loads of new SU visitors. In fact, many times I’ve written to friends to congratulate them on being a top stumbler and they hadn’t even realized it.

If your goal is visitors, your time would be better spent in more community involvement on SU instead of striving for Top Stumbler.

It does increase the amount of spam that you get though. Thankfully with the way SU works that’s still not a lot, but I did get requests to thumb up pages (which were usually ignored or thumbed down, depending on how I was asked and what the page was) and the occasional job offer.

If you hope to do more than appear at the bottom of the list occasionally, you need to be consistently thumbing up new and interesting discoveries. This can become as much work as a regular job if you’re not careful. There were many days when I’d thumb up more than 100 pages a day (sometimes more than double that) and times I’d post 40 - 50 reviews in a day.

You need to focus on finding undiscovered material. Each time that you give a thumb up to a page that someone else has already discovered you’re hurting your chance to become a top stumbler. I can’t say for sure, but from my own experience and reviewing the Top Stumblers on the list now, you probably want at least 50% or better of the total pages that you liked to be pages you discovered.

It discourages mutual sharing of web pages among friends. When your friends send you pages, they are usually hoping you’ll add a thumbs up and maybe a comment, not just read and forget about them. Since these pages are almost always already thumbed, giving them a thumb up hurts your percentages. Unfortunately, it can be a source of lost friendships.

This one is a small one, but probably drove me up the wall more than any other. Not thumbing up already discovered pages means you can only thumb up the pages of brand new stumblers, and not stumblers who’ve been around a while. I knocked myself off the Top Stumbler list one time because I finally got so frustrated with this and gave a thumb up to all the stumblers whose pages I liked. Eventually, for my own happiness I decided that I’d thumb up stumblers I like regardless of whether it affected my being on the list.

So there you have it, my top 5 reasons to think seriously before you try to get on the Top Stumblers list. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think being on the list is worth it? Why or why not? (LOL that sounds like a high school essay question. )