StumbleUpon Hits 7 Million Users, Quietly 50% Bigger Than Twitter
What's got a button to push, knows how to make money while changing the world and is read all over? StumbleUpon! The social discovery network, like Pandora for webpages and videos, just passed 7 million users according to the site. That's about 50% bigger than Twitter, though Stumble is rarely talked about and never promoted. Every media personality on the planet is gaga over Twitter.
Today is a good time to remember what a big deal StumbleUpon is, even if it's hardly ever talked about.
StumbleUpon is a Paradigm Shaker
If you haven't used StumbleUpon before, here's how it works. You install the toolbar, identify some categories of content you like on the web, then hit the Stumble button. The service takes you to a web page that is popular with people who share your interests. You've got the option to give that page a thumbs up, a thumbs down or just leave it by hitting the Stumble button again. Over time the service learns what you like and integrates that into the decisions it makes in sending you someplace new when you hit the button.
It's a fun, playful, chaotic way to navigate around the web. The service leverages recommendation technology and the network effects of analyzing large amounts of aggregate user data. Those are two of the most important factors in the emerging era online.
It might feel like a waste of time - but only if you neglect the importance that semi-structured play has in creativity, perspective, socialization and mental health. StumbleUpon is the closest thing that the Web 2.0 world has to brain therapy.
It's Really Popular
StumbleUpon hit 7 million users this week and it can be useful to compare that to Twitter. No one knows how many users Twitter really has, but Google engineer DeWitt Clinton ran some tests last month and estimates it's about 5 million users. A substantial portion of those are accounts populated by spamming robots or people who haven't taken the time to make any friends, which is the point on Twitter.
Meanwhile StumbleUpon has done zero promotion and is nearly 50% than Twitter. Stumble delivers far more traffic to websites than Twitter does and it's learned how to make money. Advertisers pay a few pennies to have their pages inserted into the Stumble streams of relevant users and those ads are silently voted on just like any other page. Silicon Alley Insider estimates the company was making $10 million each year as of this Fall. Of course those profits are landing in the pockets of eBay, who bought StumbleUpon for an estimated $75 million dollars. (There are some rumors that eBay is not happy about the deal anymore and is trying to sell StumbleUpon again).
None the less, we find StumbleUpon just fascinating. Compared to Twitter, it's bigger, drives more traffic and is world changing in different ways - all without any promotion or buzz. Happy 7 million, StumbleUpon, we're impressed.
Amit Chowdry noticed the news and blogged about it first.
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Mozilla claims 13Millions downloads, so 50% submittted?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138
how many times have you downloaded the toolbar, for say a different computer? i'd guess i have 2 or 3 times.
i love StumbleUpon , and i found this week an Add-on that work really great with it called SimilarWeb ,i highly recommend to use it together.
I think StumbleUpon is to Twitter as MySpace is to Facebook. StumbleUpon is more widely accepted by mainstream users while Twitter is more accepted by the power users. So if that's the case I can see Twitter taking the crown soon enough. It's got a lot more developer support (Where are the StumbleUpon iPhone apps?) and is apparently growing faster at the moment. It's really hard to make a userbase comparison between the two because SU is a bit older than Twitter. In any event I'm just not all that interested in visiting SU. Twitter definitely keeps my attention more.
I have a StumbleUpon account, I rarely use it. I use Twitter every day. I go to pages that my friends recommend via Twitter, as long as they include why I should visit a page. Twitter wins as a bookmark/recommend a website tool over other existing sites.
I have a StumbleUpon account, but haven't used it in a while. I downloaded the SU toolbar for firefox a while back, but ended up removing it for some reason that I can't recall at this time.
You set a pretty low bar if you consider Stumbleupon a "big thing." A better comparison to a link suggestion engine would be Delicious or even Fark or Reddit. Comparing Stumbleupon to Twitter is basically pointless. Their businesses are different; their potential user base is different; where they are on their business growth curve is different, and how they are accessed is different.
I'm starting to see that you guys don't get or like Twitter, but do a better job of ripping them down than comparing their usage to a completely different business.
Twitter is all about fast communication, API and its clients. It should not be compared with standalone Stumble Upon. I have SU account but don't use it very often. Good job SU but I like Twitter:)
Q: How do distinguish between a cavemen and a modern men?
A: Ask which one of them use Twitter.
Alright, I went bit too far. Peace:)
I use Stumbleupon and Twitter pretty much constantly. Twitter is great for interaction, but Stumbleupon is a great way to find and recommend websites without having to offer context unless I discover a new site or feel strongly enough to add a review...
And I get the feeling the comparison was done to highlight how successful SU is, and using Facebook or Myspace wouldn't have worked for well! Rather than a conspiracy...
I agree with #7 (Jim) - StumbleUpon is more of a competitor to other bookmarking/indexing sites, enabling users to discover new content with the click of a button.
SU quietly does it's thing, whereas Twitter is all about cross-communication (rather than discovery).
I love both services, but Stumbleupon is sitting on a goldmine of market data.
50% more users and several years more data collected. Plus, the data that Stumbleupon owns seems to be a lot more leverageable (?) for business purposes.
You know why people love stumbleupon? Because it's really good at giving you things that you like. That seems like something that clever folks can turn into lots of cash.
Ever heard of Google?
I signed up for StumbleUpon last month. Now I'm more addicted to it than Digg or any other social media site. So many interesting things in the video section.
BTW, thanks for the trackback, Marshall. You are the man!
-Amit
SU has consistently been a Top 10 traffic driver to one of my sites. On some days it's #1 or #2, beating out Google.
Twitter is great, but in many regards it's a hammer looking for a nail. I know the digerati has fallen head over heels for the service, and sure, one can make an effort to integrate it into their lives, but one can also do well without it.
For example, most Twitter highlights are how fast information can be spread through it, but really, it's just splitting hairs. Major media broke the Hudson river plane crash what, like one minute after the tweets went out, and only because it takes time to point cameras in that direction? Does that one minute really "prove" that Twitter does something revolutionary?
I'm an SF dweller, but talking to my friends in other parts of the country about Twitter, I'm always amazed to see how many people don't even recognize the *name*.
MySpace, Facebook, etc. all spread far and wide *very quickly*. Even GMail spread farther and more quickly, and that's plain old email.
Twitter has been around for years and has yet to carve out a userbase even a fraction of the size...do I smell Second Life :-)
Haha j/k - it's not nearly as ridiculous as the SL hoopla, but you get what I'm saying.
Check out the improved StumbleUpon: SimilarWeb (www.similarweb.com), I tried it this week and I just love it!
Anyone remember eTour.com? in the Web 1.0 days it was an eerily similar predecessor to StumbleUpon. Sold to Ask jeeves back in the day. Anyone remember how similar this was to SU? Toolbar, "next site" button, hitting that button takes you to sites matched to your interests, rate thumbs up/thumbs down, some sites in the rotation paid for the privilege. Just didnt have the social aspect. But this was back in the '90's.
I used StumbleUpon once - it was too good, it took me to obscure places and really honed in on what I would like.
Combining this with my knowledge of the size of the internet I removed the toolbar.
There are plenty of websites out there that seem to suck up your time - StumbleUpon is the ultimate time absorber.
I could have become really addicted and I knew it so I removed it before I did.
I think for research it would be awesome if you could create profiles for different learnt preferences - e.g. today I'm studying for a history paper so relearn my preferences starting now, then forget them again after today.
StumbleUpon can't be better than Twitter. StumbleUpon has a business model.
StumbleUpon is a great site, glad they have success!
OMGosh no way dude, thats a LOT of users!
RT
www.online-anonymity.at.tc
SU? Really? I would use it it they gave me points every time I went to another web site they recommended for me. And then I could use the points to buy cool stuff, like discounts at BudsAndBongs.com. But to find new stuff on the Internet? Isn't that what search is for? Last time I checked nobody was saying, 'Geez, this Google thing doesn't do a very good job of finding the things I'm nterested in finding. Wish there was a better way to find things that interested me.'
And the name Stumble Upon is terrible too.
FYI the Eventful.com service has more than 8 million users. It'll no doubt surpass 9 million soon!
I'm an SU addict. Maybe it's because I have nothing better to do. I joined SU on Feb 15th, 2005. I've liked 102,135 pages, 2,273 photos and 1,380 videos out of a total of 169,907 stumbles. Maybe I'm not an addict, that's only an average of about 116 stumbles per day. =)
Check Alexa or Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=stumbleupon,twitter
http://www.google.com/trends?q=stumbleupon.com,twitter.com
StumbleUpon might nominally have more users, but Twitter sees far more use, which strikes me as a more *useful* measure of popularity.
Revenue? Well, that's a completely different question.
I am not currently active on Stumble Upon but after I hit twitter 2 months back I have been an avid fan of it.
Will have a look at SU again.
Brian step away from the keyboard you are scaring the children. I have been a SU user for a while and actually the only time i use it is when a friend asks me to stumble something. With more than 7,000 unread things in my RSS reader at the moment I just dont have time to play with an application like that. I can remember the old days of Blog Explosion too as I sat and watched each blog load every thirty seconds. I wonder what is happening with that service these days?
Yeah, so I'm trying to figure out what StumbleUpon has to do with Twitter. While I like both, I don't see the comparison. Also, SU has been around since 2001. The fact that they only have 7 million users (while enviable for people like me), isn't the kind of growth I'd be ecstatic over if I were them/eBay. StumbleVideo is pretty sweet too by the way.
http://video.stumbleupon.com/
Anyway, what's the connection between SU and Twitter?
I am a reasonably active StumbleUpon user, with 33k plus pages thumbed in SU.
While the number of users might be quite high, in my experience, only a tenth or so of SU users are active - maybe even less so. I would put the number of real users at maybe 1 million. Of course, only SU would know how many are truly active.
There are a very large number of SU users who sign up, use it for a short while, and abandon it. Sad, as you really begin to like SU only if you continuously use it for a while.
@Beach, SU and Twitter are being compared b/c they are both sources of traffic.
Just so everyone is on the same page, Twitter was just a project when it launched in March '06, and it was not the primary focus of the team behind it until April '07.
In the strictest sense, Twitter is not even 3 years old; taking into account the lack of focus the team behind it held toward Twitter, it is not even 2 years old.
Bloggers seem to *love* SU and Digg because they are more easily gamed for traffic.
haha. "quietly"
Posted by: sum genieyclo
|
February 7, 2009 6:23 AM
They're Stumbling around in the dark, looking for Twitterers to drag to the dark side. ;)
Posted by: Tyson Key
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February 7, 2009 6:29 AM
I like SU over Digg - Ease of use it is simply all about ease of use, digg is hard, su is easy as pressing a button
Posted by: Alternating Reality Books
|
February 7, 2009 6:47 AM
I use both, and seeing as i both send and receive tweets via plugins to firefox WHILST stumbling, i see no reason as to why they are being compared as one being bigger than the other. Big whoop. They only need to be bigger & better than each other if they're in competition.
Do i see microblogging on SU?
Do i get site referrals to things tailored to my interests on Twitter?
No.
So i use them both.
Oh, and @those people trying to bring google into this: Google is a search engine. For people searching for things. That they already know about, but want to find more about.
SU is a Web Discovery site (quoted from good ole' wikipedia). For discovering new things.
What do you know? Totally different aims.
What made this an SU vs Twitter thing?
I use both. They're both great tools.
Mind you, SU has banners across the web, plus they feed you with paid content every now and then... Twitter has not paid for advertising as far as I know.
I love SU. I've been using it now for about 3 months, and I don't have enough room to write all of the positives that come with it.
I love StumbleUpon. Random entertainment at the right price.
I Love my Stumbleupon.
I don't think it's fair to say SU is "hardly ever talked about". Pretty much every blog on the internet has a banner asking for a thumbs up from SU users. SU may have been unheard of a few years ago, but not now. It's gotten more popular since ebay bought it. It's also gotten a lot less interesting and it takes a lot more stumbles until you actually find something interesting that isn't stolen from another website.
Stumbleupon is cool and i really like the redesigned website that they have now. It is much easier to use now. http://donfuxx.stumbleupon.com/
I like StumbleUpon as well but echo the sentiment that it's a different beast from Twitter w/ different use cases. StumbleUpon is less about communication and more about discovery, which I think is an underserved problem on the web.
While Google does a great job of helping me find a page or video when I know what I'm looking for, what do I do if I'm interested in something new and don't know exactly what I should search for?
SwingVine, a site we created, was created entirely for this reason. It helps people discover new music, movies, fashion, etc. w/o starting with a search. Hopefully, some of the same discovery-oriented appeal of StumbleUpon will apply to our new site.
I don't think you can really compare Stumble to Twitter other than user numbers. They serve different purposes. Who would stumbles comments?
I use stumbleupon regularly and I am really very happy it is my favourite site of all the only "bad" thing is thar it is highly addictive
Doubtful that the StumbleUpon addiction will surpass the nearing-one-of-the-most-popular Facebook addiction on Beating Addiction anytime soon.
The furtherest I've got to on Twitter is the front page. Been using SU for about 3 years and I've learnt and found so many amazing things. I'm not after the social aspect so maybe that's why I have no interest in Twitter.
Stumbleupon is more to an entertainment website (just one button will bring you to a new page that you might not have vistied before) while Twitter focuses more on communication and keeping in touch. Obviously, people love to be entertained on the web. :-) If you combine entertainment and twitter, you'd have facebook. :-)
Definitely worth mentioning in your great blog, I too noticed a couple of things and more than that experienced how stumbleupon can be of useful for promoting your site.
What I discovered on my blogs that StumbleUpon is 400 times better than digg.com. You got to see the images I posted as proof.
StumbleUpon is more useful in my opinion compared to Twitter, people who want to visit a site they haven't heard off can check them out from other people who has visited them.
The challenge with Stumble is figuring out how to use it effectively to drive appropriate traffic to your site.
It's still pretty untested as a social community. Relationships are hard to establish. You can get closed down for promoting your own content too often.
Bottom line, kinda like the proverbial horse to water: you can drive traffic to your web site, via Stumble, but you can't make them buy.
I'd love to hear case studies of how businesses have effectively used it to market their product or service. Up to this point I see it as a fun thing to play with, but the business value is still unproven.
Hoping to hear something here that will change my mind.
Services like Google and Twitter have an excellent database of sentiment for one reason: people are consciously using their services, and using them often.
StumbleUpon, however, falls into that gray area where some people are devoted users and others, like myself, find some utility in it but not enough to justify its real estate on my browser. I suspect I'm not the only one who has uninstalled it.
In my experience, there are "families" of communication utilities where the products are not made by the same companies, but the functionality addresses the same basic need. For example, Twitter is a logical descendant of CB radio, sharing the same raison d'etre and also the same challenges. IMHO, StumbleUpon is the latest version of the classic "Cool Website of the Day" or Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky"...it may help identify some interesting sites, but the heuristics involved in true matches are far beyond StumbleUpon's demonstrated ability to acquire and develop.
If StumbleUpon could demonstrate its utility to other applications while protecting itself from people trying to beat the system, perhaps things would change. But in the meantime, comparing StumbleUpon to Twitter is like saying transparent gifs are used by more websites than Flash.
Untill now I have never heard of twitter--"who haven't taken the time to make any friends, which is the point on Twitter." so its another stupid friend site? No thanks-I go online so I can have fun, not look at all the things I should know already if I'm really your friend.
I use SU all the time, I love finding new sites I would have never seen if not for the little button-----but in all fairness SU does have one problem. If you say, for example, photography, you can't pick what kinds. So I end up getting award winning photos, but of stuff I don't want to see.ever.
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