StumbleUpon Generates More Social Media Traffic Than Facebook
Facebook may have been the number one most visited website last year, but when it comes to the most social website, it’s all about Stumble Upon. On January 1st, StumbleUpon accounted for about 43% of the U.S. social media traffic, while Facebook accounted for about 38%. StumbleUpon founder and CEO, Garrett Camp, tweeted the big news yesterday.
The data was tracked by StatCounter, which follows 15 billion page views on the Web per month on more than three million websites. Amongst the data tracked are the top seven social media sites: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Myspace and Digg. Although StumbleUpon has a much smaller user base than Facebook — 13 million compared to Facebook’s 500 million — it generates more traffic than Facebook.
This could indicate Facebook does not have as much power as assumed at the end of 2010. While Facebook’s user base is expansive, they are not as active as on other social media sites; or at least not as active in delivering engagement. Maybe the numbers would flip if StumbleUpon launched a new version of Farmville. As Facebook looks to monetize in 2011, it may have to look at buying, or at least, partnering with other social media outlets for any effective marketing efforts.
At the same time, this is something of a hollow victory for StumbleUpon. As anyone with a Google Analytics account knows, StumbleUpon traffic is almost worthless from an engagement perspective. Content sites like Lockergnome get StumbleUpon traffic that bounces in and bounces out with time on page statistics in the 5-10 second range, compared to a sitewide average of more than 30 seconds. People who click from Facebook are far closer in behavior to visitors from other major referrers, like Google. Maybe the real lesson here is that some people are click happy about farming while other people are excited to click on as many websites as they can visit in an afternoon of work.
Is StumbleUpon’s traffic brag just another brag of measuring size over substance? Or is there something to the serendipity of discovery?
