What is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery?

One of the most enduring of sharing sites, StumbleUpon has in recent months moved to monetise its service through the introduction of Paid Discovery. To understand how Paid Discovery works, you need to first understand how StumbleUpon works, and how a legion of ‘Stumblers’ helps you to seed your webpages to a larger audience.

StumbleUpon and the StumbleUpon toolbar allow people (‘Stumblers’) to discover content that they would not ordinarily have found through their normal web browsing habits; there are 15 million StumbleUpon accounts being used to discover web content, in over 500 topics of engagement. From fine arts to funny videos, Stumblers are recommending content to people in a ’word of mouth’ fashion – sometimes  they‘re friends and following each other’s recommendations, and other times it’s almost like conversations being overheard at dinner.

By using the ‘Stumble’ button in the toolbar, users are taken through a stream of pages that reflect their interests, all of which have been recommended by a Stumbler. The traffic that arrives to your site through StumbleUpon is therefore engaged and receptive to a topic.

Users review websites and recommend them to people interested in the same topics as them - when Stumblers find a site that they want to recommend either positively or negatively, they can vote with a thumb up or down, or become more involved and write a review and tag the page. Tags can be chosen from the list of topics, or Stumblers apply their own tags relevant to the website filing – quite handy for SEO as you’re getting a natural vote with a natural keyword!

Once your site has been given the thumbs up by a Stumbler, it is integrated into the stream of sites that users are ‘stumbling’ to. As each Stumbler votes a site up or down, they improve its visibility to the network of people interested in the same topics. Your website is found by Stumblers based on their interests (which they define in their profile), and how Stumblers are naturally categorising your website – with Paid Discovery, you ‘seed’ to a list of topics related to your content.

The more users that like your site, the more people will see it - driving additional earned media. When a page stops getting votes or becomes too old, it is simply shown fewer and fewer times, in a lower position in the site rotation, and so Stumblers need to cast regular votes to maintain authority and topic relevance; it’s like a topic search engine, with the votes having the same effect on a webpage’s authority as a link from an external source. This of course has drawbacks if you have great content but it’s not being found by Stumblers so they can vote it into a high traffic position; this is where Paid Discovery plays its part.

Paid Discovery

As with search engines, it can be difficult to break into the top websites, particularly if your pages are time-sensitive - for a campaign or competition, for example. Paid Discovery can be used by site owners to deliver the right audience to your site based on interest in your category at the right time. It’s like planting propagated seedlings into a naturally sown field, with your audience acting as the rain and sun to help them grow. And if they choose not to water your site? Well, you can monitor that and make the necessary changes as the campaigns tie in with Google Analytics - tracking and advanced reporting is available within the platform which offers data such as sharing statistics, broken out by demographics and the basic reporting features. Taking the time to work out what works best for you pages will help you to return a positive awareness of your webpages.

Using Paid Discovery means that a guaranteed audience arrives directly to your site and sees it in the context of other relevant sites - this audience is in the mind-set to discover new things, expecting to like what they find. But, while Stumblers are likely to be receptive, you still have to ensure your site is suitable for them – make it interesting, unique, relevant, eye-catching and not too content-heavy, which has proved to be a turn-off to Stumblers looking for something novel and exciting to distract them.

Because there is no clicking through ads or links from other pages, your website is the ad, meaning you control 100% of the engagement. If a page shows very few votes from Stumblers, you can switch the focus of the campaign in your site, moving to a new landing page for your Stumbler traffic. This can help you to split test landing pages and determine the best way to drive interaction from a non-StumbleUpon audience.

The payment bidding plan really is highest bidder first, however there are three bid amounts that StumbleUpon has chosen across all topics: $0.05, $0.10, $0.25. The traffic is cheap, it’s qualified if you’re handling your campaign correctly, you only pay for unique stumbles and it’s seeding your content out to millions of users.

This blog post was written by Sarah. If you want to discuss this post, why not follow us on Twitter?