The most popular male exercise in the United States today is sitting in a comfy chair, remote control in hand, and giving your right thumb a 4 or 5 hour workout.
Point Click - Point Click - Point Click - Point Click
One does not really NEED to point the remote directly at the television, but you get the picture.
“1,000 channels and still nothing to watch,” is the common grumble during this grueling workout routine. Yet we still pay upwards of $100.00 per month for hundreds of cable channels, hundreds more “music” channels, and on demand movies, etc. But the paradigm works. Advertisers get their campaigns in front of many people who are “channel surfing” despite the fact that the expert channel surfer can spend as little as 2 seconds on a channel before moving on to the next one down the list.
This paradigm, however, never really had a successful extension on the internet. At first a website was at the mercy of a few static pages that linked to it. One would need to either know the website name verbatim or know where a link was to get to it. Fortunately, the number of websites to actually visit was still small in number.
As the availability of domain names increased with decreasing prices, and places like Geocities and Tripod offering free webpage hosting to Joe Enduser, the amount of places to visit grew exponentially. Categorizing and chronicling those sites gave rise to the Search Engine (Yahoo, Altavista, Google, etc). It has been the search engine that has driven the identity and advertising campaigns for commercial as well as private web pages for the last 10 years.
The paradigm is shifting again. Static content is being replaced with dynamic content, blogs and CMS sites. Search engines are slowly being overtaken by the rise of social networks like Myspace, Faceparty and Digg. Where the search engine is revenue and equation driven the social network is community driven. Not driven like the much maligned “wiki” concept, but driven by the votes of the individual users.
This type of paradigm brings us right to Stumbleupon and what some are calling the Stumble Effect. In a nutshell Stumbleupon is a browser addon that gives the user the ability to “channel surf” the Stumble community based upon the users preferred viewing topics. And the topic choices are considerable. Very specific websites can be “stumbled upon” with careful consideration by the user and the people initially “stumbling” a website or article.
If enough care is given to keyword choice, article content or appearance, and appeal of the topic to an audience or audiences, the results can be very impressive.
Take for instance a website my partner and I put up as a “hobby site”. One that we wanted to see online but could not really find. A place for “Work Safe/Family Safe” images, stories, websites, animations. We found a good domain name and put it “out there” without much thought to promotions or advertising. Just a place to have to experiment with and have some fun.
The website is www.coolthingstolookat.com and it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of content yet, it is a diversion from our normal duties and commitments. But one of the experiments went horribly right… so right that the thinking is changing for the domain.
Here was the experiment. My partner found a cool picture and wanted to put to use all of his SEO skills that he had gleaned and garnered from the web and classes he has taken over the last few months. So he wrote a small article for some background information on the image and went all out on keyword choice, promotion of the article to social networks, the whole nine yards. Stumbleupon was one of many social networks to which this image and article was submitted. Here are the results as far as hits and visits to the site using the Word Press plugin Popstats.
The article was submitted on February 3rd and you can see a “blip” on the chart just past the midway point as the initial few users and bots checked out the new submission.
The giant spike happened about 8 days later as the article reached a “critical mass” point in Stumble where it had enough “thumbs ups” to start getting displayed with more frequency in the topic areas chosen. But those lines don’t mean much without the numbers to go with them.
That is right. From Stumble the visits went from 24 per day to a high of nearly 3,000 in only 3 DAYS. Once the point was reached where the article was being offered more regularly it was being awarded “Thumbs Up” more regularly, an upwards cycle has started. Where it will end or taper off we have no idea.
But the entire situation has lead to other new thoughts on the web design and hosting front. Half way through the month and we are already getting bandwidth warnings. Design elements that did not come into consideration such as the size of common images, 404 page redirects, and other things now matter a great deal when 12,000 page views are being served up per day.
And such things as Google Ad placement are now much bigger considerations. With the 100x increase in traffic there has NOT been a 100x increase in ad revenue. Ad placement is of course one thing, but a bigger factor is the “channel surf” mentality that Stumble Upon engenders.
Even for myself, I find myself visiting websites and lingering less and less because the initial appeal of the site or the content did not draw me in within the first few seconds. Or it took too long to load, or maybe even a temporary dead link. Whatever the factor, with the Stumble Button 
on the browser bar if I do not get instant gratification from my first “channel” I hit the button again and “surf” to the next webpage.
Some new thinking has to be applied to ad placement, content presentation, and overall site design if the SEO is going to translate a potential 100x increase in visits and page views into a comparable increase in ad revenue. Just as the Television ad producers had to adapt over a decade ago to the television remote control web designers and SEOs must adapt to the Stumble Effect, the 21st Century remote control for the World Wide Web.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Blogging, Computer, Humanity.
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