I asked because I'm seeing a good percentage of links to our site, but when I click through to them all I get is a salesy page about advertising on StumbleUpon.
Before I bought stumbleupon stumbles I was amazed at the exceptionally high pageviews per visit I was getting from SU. As soon as I dropped real money on it, the PV/user went to roughly the same as everywhere else.
I looked at the "referring sites" (in google analytics) and found that one of the pages was /refer.php which was the advertising page you mention.
I have an unproven feeling that my analytics from SU were somehow artificially inflated or something like that. My own personal experience is that I'm unimpressed with SU.
Others would disagree with me, and hopefully, someone somewhere will be able to convince me otherwise.
Thanks for the insight. Yes, perhaps they inflate the pageviews (somehow) to garner interest and get you to throw down money.
In general, I'm not a fan of paid search since it creates an artificial boost in traffic. It's fine if you're a large company with a big ad budget, but even so, as soon as you turn of the spigit, the water runs dry...
You'll be able to see the review page that people are stumbling from. One one of my websites receives average 200 unique free stumbles per day and I have since become a paid advertiser, though their categories for targeting are very limited, imho.
Well, you pay per stumble. I'm fortunate that the site in question fits perfectly into their "Fantasy Books" category, consequence of which the stumbles tend to spend quite a lot of time on my website and convert to members. I have also found that, since I started paying for a nominal amount of stumbles, that my free stumbles have also increased! Though that my be a coincidence I'm sure.
On a related note, I read you can buy "stumbles" and readers from StumbleUpon and Reddit, but it sounds like DuckDuckGo and Whiteboard had mixed results: http://tinycomb.com/2010/07/19/our-reddit-ad-by-the-numbers-...