[thesethings]

Sincere request: Can somebody explain the dynamics of how Stumbleupon is so popular? I don't know anybody who uses it. I am friends with alpha-geeks, teenagers, senior citizens, native Spanish-speakers in Mexico, etc. Barely anybody I know uses it.

I had a StumbleUpon account before Twitter, before StumbleUpon was a URL shortener, etc. I used it a little, but people didn't seem thaaaat into it. There must be some pocket of main use-case there. Is it mostly the URL shortener that even non-S.U. users bounce around in when directed to a su.pr URL?

I'd love to understand this.

(Also, as somebody else pointed out, S.U. traffic is pretty low-quality. Just peep your Google Analytics, and those sessions are quite short compared to Twitter/FB/Tumblr referrers. At least on my sites.)

[webwright]

I think it's less popular than these stats might indicate.

1 Facebook user might click on 1 or 2 links per day.

1 SU user "stumbles" dozens or hundreds of times in a session.

A stumble nets a pageview, but obviously has considerably less value (no intent baked into the click).

[sudont]

Quote from a friend who stumbles: "oh yeah. totally. i hit 100 pages and maybe read 5 of them"

It's like a youtube party, but with a little fast-forward button: http://xkcd.com/920/

[mithaler]

I used to use it heavily, but I stopped when I moved to Chrome, since at the time it didn't have Chrome support and even now it feels hacky.

Worth noting that SU traffic may be unusually low-engagement, since I would think it's likely a user will just click Stumble again after the half a second or so you get to grab their attention. (That's an educated guess, mind you--I don't have any data to support this beyond how using SU felt to me.)

[Hovertruck]

I was wondering the same thing. I've never had the inclination to even go to their website.

[icegreentea]

Among my friends (university students, canada), it's pretty much used for idling wasting time when we need to give reddit or youtube a break.