Sometime today, StumbleUpon will register its five millionth user. (At the time of this writing, it is at 4,994,826 registered users). That number is kind of meaningless, though, because it counts anyone who has ever registered for the Website-rating and discovery service, and who may no longer use it. StumbleUpon, which is part of eBay, does not disclose how many active users it has.
But it did provide me with the nifty little graph above which shows how many times users actually “stumble” something on the Web. (When you like a site or a video you can stumble it by giving it a thumbs up—the more stumbles a page gets, the higher it ranks when others are looking for similar pages). The service is about to collect its five billionth stumble within the next 30 days. Users have already stumbled more than one billion times so far this year. Stumbling activity was up 160 percent during the first quarter of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007 (with 974 million stumbles versus 375 million).
Meanwhile, traffic to the site has been steadily climbing back since taking a huge dive last fall. According to comScore, unique visitors worldwide dropped from 4.8 million last October to 1.8 million in December, but came back up to 3.2 million in March. Many active users never go to the site, and just stumble from their browser toolbar. But as the quality of StumbleUpon’s user-selected index improves, it should attract more casual visitors to its site.
Most people think of StumbleUpon as a socially-powered discovery engine rather than a search engine, but personal discovery and search may be colliding. During a recent speech at the Next Web conference, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp noted:
Personalized search is just getting started. I think personalized crawling will start too. Crawlers now are trying to create the biggest map of the web, but implicit filtering and intelligent agents—that is where search and discovery will meet. My query log isn’t actually representative of what I want on the Web.
I like that idea of a personalized Web crawler that indexes only the part of the Web deemed to be most relevant to you and people you know or who share the same interests. Stumbleupon already identifies other users related to you who are drawn to similar Websites, and is building a general index of high-quality sites. The more stumbles it collects, the better its index, and the easier it will be to personalize that down the road. With the number of stumbles rapidly accelerating, the next five billion should take only about another year to gather.
A good site to have in the toolbox, although the trends can be (are) self-reinforcing (in the not so good way).
I have used it for many years now – and I am very happy for them. Way to go SU!
I use it to find inspiration for our blog (and upcoming web tv show
I still wonder how StumbleUpon makes sense for eBay
I guess finding out on what retail product pages people are stumblin’ is quite valuable for ebay
When I have an hour to waste surfing the net…I just stumble.
You find the best stuff from the site. One of my favs
I really like SU. But I use it as a diversion and not to look for anything in particular.
I was longing for a newer version of URL Roulette for ages. Then SU came and some months later I consider this to be one of the best tools I ever ’stumbled upon’.
I have found new and highly interesting people and their blogs, have a lot of interesting content from all kind of topics and more. I just plain love it.
Now, to bring up the usual argument of langauge (which is the biggest problem ever with such apps – i know, just relevant for people who do speak more than one language): I cannot add non english content to my SU as it would make my friendfeed friends and more unsubscribe.
In case you think ‘huh’?! – SU is one of the only apps which gets language. If I submit masses of content in lang x, you might see it on my homepage, but you will not stumble through it, if you have not checked this language in your settings.
But SU only provides one feed of my results – meaning everything goes into the lifestream services. Which is why I – and many others btw – do not contribute non english content to it. A shame really, I would probably have not 1.3 but more 2.6K in pages added.
btw – The real fun will begin when ebay will start implementing algorithmic parts into their auction business. How? Easy. “Other people who liked this item also liked this item in the categories of articles you are also interested in” and “shall I show you an interesting article in an category you are interested in based on thumbs up and thumbs down of other members”
I found lot of good sites with StumbleUpon. Would be keen to How Ebay uses SU. They can integrate good Ebay listing with built in Stumble button.
Like #4 above, I wonder what eBay gets out of it.
@Erick – technically speaking, this is different from a personal crawler+indexer+searcher, though the effect might be similar.
So what caused that major UV drop last year??
Universal Applicability? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/oFNhLxVKvH_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Universal Applicability? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/3XKGwvQvfd”}}}
Yeah stumble is my favourite site everyday when i surfing on net. From there i can finding more story and i can making more friends.
Saturday morning cartoons have been replaced by Stumbling. Good times.
“That number is kind of meaningless, though, because”
I think it is odd to state this as something only specific to StumbleUpon when pretty much any mention of a site’s “membership” includes these inactive users. Look at home many times people talk about myspace having 200 million members… Not factoring in that about 50% of those don’t even exist on the servers anymore, let alone have inactive profiles.
StumbleUpon provides an interesting way to find good content. I would be interested to know how many people are paying pro users.
-D
eBay should leverage the StumbleUpon technology into it’s e-commerce businesses by adding an I-want button to the tool-bar, coupled to a separate/private consumer profile/survey, and let users stumble-shop, shop/blog, feedback to sellers and pay for it all with paypal.
Interested in how this will work? Contact me at mrrustymofo at aol.
I’m with Fabian above.
SU is great. I’ve found some really wonderful sites that I probably would never have discovered otherwise. (Some of the astronomy sites are really impressive!)
But SU is something I use when I have an hour to kill. It’s not something I’d use in lieu of a traditional Search.
What does Ebay get out of stumble? First, its easy to monetize by selling stumbles. There’s worse ways of spending an ad budget than directing tens of thousands of willing visitors to your site, and getting hundreds of thousands more if you provide good content.
Second, SU contains a wealth of useful information about what you like and dislike. Ebay, with its skype acquisition, has shown that it believes there’s value in providing the infrastructure of communication. And the broader the net you cast, the more information you can gather, and the more you can sell your ad spots for.
I wrote an article about StumbleUpon’s ability to dominate search, check it out at: http://www.stum...ke-over-search/
Although I’m an avid stumbler, I’ve recently been getting better pages from streakr.
The stumble algorithm seem to always give me the same old stuff, maybe I should stop stumbling bizarre.
The concept of a personalized crawler is interesting. I started building something to do this 2 years ago, and it is done now. Check out:
http://www.iprecis.com
to see it. Basically you can limit your search to sites you find useful, however one thing I really like about it is that ranking (via google) uses page rank from the entire web. So you get the best of both worlds, only the sites you trust and page rank over the whole web to sort your trusted sites.
Stumble upon is such a inspiration! As a web developer I work 12 hours a day on a computer and SU is just a nice tea break! Thanks!
It saddens me to know Ebay owns SU.
I too love SU, but I was not fond of having an extra toolbar. So I built this as an alternative to SU: http://www.SpinSnap.com
I found lot of good sites with StumbleUpon. Would be keen to How Ebay uses SU
I am an active Stumbler, and have been using it to watch viral videos on Youtube. And well, I have witnessed some really crazy blogs as well.
I have really enjoyed SU. I can’t imagine what I did before I found them. I hope they continue to improve the site and draw in even more people.
SU has revolutionized the way i surf. now, all PCs that i use simply has to have the SU toolbar. but i must add that there are few spam sites that i encounter. it is sad, but if there’s more good than bad that i find in SU, i think that’s okay.
I use just about every trendy tool there is out there except SU. Maybe I’ll be the 5mil fictitious user and download a copy now.
Stumbling is better than TV. Every stumble session, you always learn and see something new. One of the best things that happened to the internet. DIGG does compare because it is a hassle to dig something. STUMBLE took it up a notch. They just need to work on their community features.
Congrats to SU, it’s a good site for random and juicy finds.
i wonder if i am the 5 billionth