The popular social discovery application StumbleUpon has recently passed the 7 million user mark which, according to ReadWriteWeb is 50% more users than Twitter has.
Although user stats for Twitter are hard to come by, recent estimates by Google engineer DeWatt Clinton suggest that between 5m and 5.5m accounts have been created on Twitter since it’s launch; however, only 1.5-1.6m users have gone back to post again after they first created their account. Of these, Clinton estimates Twitter has 1.2-1.3m active and connected users.
StumbleUpon doesn’t state how many of their 7m users are active and connected, but 7m users is still a great deal more than 5m. Considering the large amount of mainstream press and hype Twitter has been receiving of late, it is surprising that people still don’t hail StumbleUpon in a similar manner. Even in the web marketing community.
The benefits of StumbleUpon for marketing are vast. If relevant, interesting content is submitted to the right categories, StumbleUpon has the potential to refer large amounts of traffic over a long period of time. As Amit Chowdhry notes, this is much more beneficial that the huge, one off spike that Digg or Reddit can send.
The benefits of StumbleUpon for the user however, are even greater. StumbleUpon adds serendipity to your web surfing that simply searching for content and clicking on links doesn’t. It’s been compared to watching TV, although adding much more to the user experience than TV does.
Aside from pressing the “random article” button in Wikipedia, it wasn’t easy to just stumble across something you weren’t looking for on the web before StumbleUpon, and still, it was highly likely you would get something that wouldn’t interest you. StumbleUpon ensures you get content that will.
It’s curious why people don’t talk about StumbleUpon more; news reference volume is vastly higher for Twitter than for StumbleUpon. Maybe it is because you don’t see celebrities using StumbleUpon. However, it cannot be ignored. 7m users with a fraction of the publicity Twitter has received shows that it is a stayer and is only going to get bigger.
Related posts:
- Twitter CEO gives baffling first UK TV Interview
- The Great British Twitter Unmasking (or what Jonathan Ross does in his spare time)
- Mobile internet usage on the up
- Twitter ends UK SMS service
- Big changes coming to Twitter Search
