StumbleUpon: Mention it and they will come

Earlier this year, I wrote an article titled StumbleUpon: A Web 2.0 mashup. The aim of this article was to see how the numbers of visitors would be affected by providing incorrect information. In the short 4 paragraph article I stated that:

"I figured that StumbleUpon must add the top and newest sites on Digg to its list of sites."

I knew at the time for this to be a twist of the truth. The only reason that sites from Digg are also in StumbleUpon is that they are added by StumbleUpon users who might be reading Digg at the time. Despite this article containing such a large piece of disinformation, the amount of traffic it recieved was nowhere near hindered.

The graph above show the number of visitors to my site before and after publishing the test article. The article attracted more visitors to the site than normal and is now the top viewed article. At its peak, the traffic levels reached 1000 visitors in a day. This is a large number as the past average has been no where near this.

As well as attracting more visitors, the article recieved more visits from stumbleupon.com than anywhere else. StumbleUpon eclipesed all other referrers for the week.

What made this interesting was the fact that the article was rubbish.

• It was only 172 words long (just over a third of an A4 page)
• Incorrect information was present in the article
• The only correct information was a generalised version of what is offered on the StumbleUpon About page

If incorrect articles on small websites like this can draw in 1000 visitors in one day, it worries me to think how many people would view and believe a well written yet incorrect article on a large corperate new site.

In the Internet / Wiki age it still seems like one of the biggest pitfalls is the ability to spread incorrect information.

Tags: Miscellaneous, Opinion, Stumbleupon, Website Marketing

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• StumbleUpon: A Web 2.0 mashup!
• Judging a sites popularity
• Unequal Discrimination
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