Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

By happy coincidence at around-about the time I was asked to help build the Sick Britain UK Urbex blog I had been given a £50 Google Adwords voucher as part of a promotion and so I decided to try it out to help launch and promote the blog (my experiences will be summarised in a separate post). Once the money had started to dry up I considered how else to promote the blog and though I was primarily seeking free methods of promoting the site the idea of Stumbleupon advertising caught my interest.

For those of you that haven’t used it, Stumbleupon is a ’social bookmarking’ site – kind of like Digg or Delicious but with it’s own unique mechanism. To use Stumbleupon you just select one or more topics in which you have an interest and then hit the “Stumble” button to be taken to a (theoretically) random site in that category, submitted by other Stumbleupon users. At the top of the browser window a small strip of controls is maintained as you stumble from site to site and for each page you can vote to say that you like or dislike a page or simply hit “Stumble” to move on.

From a user perspective it’s all pretty cool although it was the advertising concept that was interesting me – essentially you can pay to have your site inserted into people’s stumble path for a flat fee of $0.05 per pageview. I’m not sure how clear it is to the user (if at all) that they’re looking at a site that’s in their path because someone paid their five cents or because of recommendations and I must say that it did feel a little ‘ooky’.

Setting up a new campaign is pretty straight-forward, you select up to three categories in which you’d like your site to appear, put in your target URL and then hit the submit button. The problem here is that the setup is a little too simple and you don’t get any advanced demographic targeting (age groups, locations) until after the the campaign has gone live. The second irritation I had with Stumbleupon Ads was that each campaign has to be approved and you still can’t adjust the demographic targeting until the campaign is live which for one of my tests took almost 24 hours (the quickest was around 12hrs). Now I’m just a small time web developer and these timescales stink for me so I’d imagine that any serious hardcore web marketeers out there would balk at the idea of waiting anywhere near as long as this to get a campaign up and running, especially when competing ad networks can do this in an instant.

The final irritation for me is that when I decided to put the pedal to the metal and spend my whole £15 in one go I removed the daily dollar value cap and found that my entire budget was blown within a few hours. Now I’m fully aware that I had a small budget but I find the fact that Stumbleupon make no effort to smooth out traffic patterns quite disturbing. If I were advertising a commercial site I might want 10,000 hits in one day but I almost certainly don’t want them to arrive within a couple of hours as it could play havoc with my bandwidth and web application servers.

So despite my original excitement at the idea of Stumbleupon advertising (enough excitement to blow £15 of real cash) I’ve definitely gone cold and can’t see myself using the service again unless they address some of the key problems I found.

For users: http://www.stumbleupon.com/
For advertisers: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

written by thirtyfootscrew