Young Entrepreneur Blog

StumbleUpon has had a whopping 4 million downloads, and to celebrate we have a world exclusive interview with the top 30 users of Stumbleupon.com

Today we are speaking with Stumbleupon top user: BlackLotus90

How long have you been an active user of StumbleUpon?

I’ve been an active SU user since June, 2006

What makes you use StumbleUpon more than the other social sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us etc…?

StumbleUpon is extremely accessible. It gives you the toolbar right there in your browser, and at any time you can just click that stumble button and be whisked away to a site you’re interested in. Unlike other social bookmarking sites, SU provides me with sites that are from many different genres but that still are almost all interesting to me. Also, StumbleUpon has a community aspect absent in most other “social” bookmarking sites. Users all seem to care about the welfare of the site and community, and people interact one-on-one very genuinely. Nowadays there’s starting to be a bit more manipulation/spam, but to be honest I’ve only ever received one true scam message, and that user was banned within days.

If you could make one positive change to the current Stumbeupon platform, what would it be?

I think that the StumbleUpon platform needs a way to stumble your own stumbles. With almost 4000 thumbed-up sites, I think the ability to go back through sites I liked a while ago would be good both for nostalgic value as well as to cull any sites which were just sort of spur-of-the moment things.

What don’t you like about the current StumbleUpon platform?

I don’t like the fact that we cannot embed anything more than images in our posts. Simple HTML formatting is possible, and CSS only with some extra scripts, but I think that, even if just for one sticky post, that SU users should be able to post things such as dynamic flash content (widgets from other sites for example)

What are the main factors you look for in content that you feel is worth stumbling?

I think that the content worth stumbling is the content I’d go up to my friends with and tell them “Hey, check this out!” If I see something that inspires feeling in me, whether it’s uproarious laughter, activism, or sadness, it’s usually worth stumbling.

Is there anything that puts you off stumbling an article?

Some articles are duplicates of other articles or links to other articles, these often flood the network with 3 or four copies the same story or video, so I don’t often stumble them. In most cases, it really depends on the article, I’m not sure I could give you any specific criteria.

What sort of topics interest you the most?

I’m most interested in science, computers, bargains, electronic music, p2p, internet, video games, and atheist/evolution/theism discussion. This doesn’t necessarily reflect what I stumble, although a large portion of my stumbles are made up of these things.

What advice would you give to a brand new user of Stumbleupon?

Many people are joining SU to promote their sites. I think that this is fine, but I’d advise them not to stumble their own site any more than once a week/once every 20 entries. It’s pretty clear when a stumbler is only liking their own articles, and these people are generally avoided because they are not in the network to contribute to it as a whole.
Many new users don’t realize the importance of the social aspect of StumbleUpon. Making friends is a great way to get more relevant pages, and you can meet some pretty interesting people with viewpoints different from your own that have a lot to share. At the same time, don’t accept every single person who wants to be your friend: SU has a friends limit of 250 and if you add a bunch of users who are either promoting only their own content or are inactive, it will not benefit them nor you.

Do you ever get thanked by the site owners after you stumble their content?

Occasionally site owners will thank me, it’s a genuinely nice gesture, and I know how good it feels to have people positively review your page, being a site owner myself. Sometimes these thanks include promotional messages (you can also visit my other site blablabla) and I usually will check out that other site, but I only mark it as liked if I think it’s worth sharing like any other site.

Has anyone ever tried to bribe you into stumbling their content?

I’m sometimes solicited to visit and thumb-up websites, and these are usually with good intentions, but I don’t thumb them up unless they’re really interesting. Occasionally I’ve had stumble-for-stumble offers, but this just makes me less likely to even visit that user’s site.

Do you own a website? And if so, what have been your biggest StumbleUpon successes from your site?

I do own a website, www.earnovertheweb.com . I started it a while ago and haven’t been very active in the last month or so. I’ve only stumbled my own content a few times, and I usually see a spike in traffic followed by a residual set of visitors over the next few weeks (something you wouldn’t get from Digg etc.). My biggest success was something like 10,020 visitors over seven days, but this was the result of three posts (back before I realized that stumbling one’s own content isn’t really desirable).

What are your thoughts on stumbling your own content?

I have stumbled a few choice posts, but I wouldn’t dream of trying to flood my site upon others. With more than 3600 thumbed-up pages, I figure I might as well throw in a couple from my own site. It has brought in traffic successfully before, but only on a few good posts, so I’d say that yes, I’ve used SU to promote the site, but no, I don’t rely on it to market my site. I’d say that it’s okay to stumble one’s own content so long as you’re also truly contributing plenty of other content. It’s not really nice to sign up for SU just to stumble one’s own content.

What are your thoughts on Linkbait and people creating content with the sole aim of getting traffic from sites like Stumbleupon?

It was a good strategy when it was first introduced, because people didn’t know about SU and stumblers were used to stumbles being purely because of people’s likes. Now, just about every SEO blog has some article or another about how amazing SU is to promote a site, but the truth is that the algorithms have been put in place so that promotion is harder. I’m sure I’ve thumbed-up some linkbait posts, but as long as the content’s great and continues to be, linkbaiting isn’t a huge sin. As far as the aim of purely getting traffic, it’s very difficult for this kind of thing to be successful, and if it is successful, it usually means there is some worthy content somewhere.

Are you influenced by factors like authority of the website, design of the website etc? And if so, what sort of things do you specifically look for?

I honestly couldn’t really name specifics, but of course there are things which do/don’t influence my decision.

Why do you feel you are in the top 30 most powerful users of StumbleUpon?

I have contributed a huge amount of sites to SU. I stumble almost every day (almost out of my body’s own volition; one time my toolbar was gone and I just kept reflexively moving my mouse up there as if to click “stumble). I think I’m a top user because I stumble sites that a lot of people like me also find very interesting. I always write a pretty thorough 1 or two sentences about new sites that I submit and I give them many tags. It’s about being a user who can contribute a lot to the overall community, and being balanced in reviewing, liking, friends, etc.

What advice would you give to anyone who wanted to get into the top 30?

I did not aim to get into the top 30 for any reason, it simply happened. I think that you stand a good chance if you rank and tag a lot of new pages as well as rating most that you come across, but I also stick to my opinion that you should only stumble pages you like. Having photo stumbles will often increase the aesthetics of your blog, but don’t worry about it if that’s not your thing, even with only a couple webcomics interspersed in my text stumbles, I made it to the top 30. Another thing is to be transparent. I see the majority of stumblers being people who are interested in finding out about others’ interests, so just be yourself.

Grab the Full 14 Interview Box set Now!

Completely FREE to Your Inbox

Click the image below for your FREE interviews