Our Next Target: StumbleUpon
We have said since the beginning that Digg was only our first target. As we have grown, we have learned so much about how to game social media sites. We even survived a direct assualt by Digg one month ago, which forced us to make our system more complex. The new system has been refined many times over, and we can now call ourselves “experts” at this stuff.
Thus, the incubation stage is over, and we are going to spread, spread, spread! We will expand to sites in the order in which they have the most users and are easiest to game. After considering a few possible targets, StumbleUpon emerged as the clear winner. Here’s why:
- StumbleUpon has over 2.6 million users as of today and is the fastest growing social bookmarking service.
- Gaming activity is far less suspicious because there is no single public view of activity, unlike Digg. When a person sees a story on the front page of Digg with 80 votes, they can ask “why did 80 people vote for this?” In the case of StumbleUpon, users click the “Stumble!” button and are taken to a random page, which could have been voted for by 1 or 10,000 people, and the numbers are not apparent without further research.
- StumbleUpon also promotes its own advertisements, so there may be less outcry.
- StumbleUpon offers a linear traffic model. Digg is an all or nothing proposition, and many advertisers are afraid of wasting money if their story gets buried. Our StumbleUpon service will also allow advertisers with smaller budgets to use S&P.
- StumbleUpon users are far more diverse in their interests than the Digg crowd, and this allows more advertisers to use our service.
Why not Reddit?
Many people assumed that Reddit was going to be our next target, and even asked us if we would please expand to Reddit. However, Reddit is smaller than StumbleUpon, offers a traffic model that is more similar to Digg, and users’ votes are not set to be publicly shown by default.
Reddit is not for us.
The next few weeks
We are now accepting StumbleUpon users, though new Digg users are always welcome as well. Once we have a critical mass of StumbleUpon users, we will open up to advertisements, so stay tuned. Digg advertising will continue as normal.
Great, great great!
More services supported = more cash for me and my friends.
Earning with S&P is a pleasure for me
You should do tabs on the Social user webpage like “Digg” and “Stumbleupon”, it will make future easier.
Support for Stumbleupon is great idea - I’ve received over 20 000 uniqes to my techblog from it.
Great move!
“new Digg users are always welcome as well”
there’s a problem - my girlfriend regitered.. few weeks ago (?) and hasn’t been verified yet. It’s probably not wise to give here her login [similar to the digg one] so please email me and I will give you more informations
thanks!
I like the direction you guys are going, keep up the good work.
Awesome! I use StumbleUpon quite a bit so this is not a big change for me. Kudos guys!
You sure the reason you’re not gaming reddit isn’t because you can’t? Considering they’re the only social news site of status that has a unique front page algorithm: links actually need to be sustained with upvotes over time to remain on the front page.
This makes it much harder to game since they don’t start out at #1 once leaving the “new page”.
But maybe you just want to try something new with Stumble. Either way, keep up the great work!!!
Stumbleupon..
yes, I used this for a while and I believe it is not as easy as you think…
if the content is not that “cool”, people is going to vote it down very soon…
I tried before and I know only the cool contents can stay for a while…
jacob,
yes, as we said, one of the reasons we decided against reddit was because their votes are not public. This makes gaming them much harder, because our users would stick out.
man i love you guys…..
So what are you guys gonna do if you’re able to make Digg and StumbleUpon completely useless?
I think this is pretty damn funny.
But remember that parasites usually die when they kill the host.
I signed up as an advertiser because the upcoming StumbleUpon feature. Are you going to send out an email notification when this is available?
this will not make SU worthless because not everyone will thumb up the sites they don’t like.