An Interview With The Creator Of Too Much StumbleUpon - A Piece Of Viral Marketing Genius

Image credit: too much stumbleupon

Around about a week ago I was happily stumbling away when all of a sudden this warning page came up, telling me that my account had been disabled:

Stumbleupon warning

Stumbleupon has been temporarily disabled, because you have used it too much.

• Stop stumbling and disable stumbleupon toolbar
• Do your work
• Don’t think about stumbling

I feel really stupid now, but I fell for this thing hook, line and sinker. I thought that I had been caught stumbling my own blog too much and that someone at stumbleupon was messing with me.

The page is possibly one of the most popular stumbles ever, it was discovered about 8 days ago and already it has received 351 reviews.

I wanted to find out more about the page and who created it, so I used the form on the website to contact the creator. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me, but wishes to remain anonymous:

Question 1: How long have you been a member of StumbleUpon?

Answer: I have used stumbleupon since April 2007, So it is about 1,5 years ago.

Question 2: Did you create the page for fun? profit? Or both?

Answer: It was just for fun, I was bored and playing with new firefox 3 and surfing on the “about:robots” page. I noticed how easily the source of the about:robots page could be copied, I remembered those funny “stop stumbling” images and got the idea. I created the page, uploaded it to my site, added it to stumble and forgot it.

Question 3: How many unique visitors has the page had so far?

Answer: Here are my traffic statistics according to AWStats and Google Analytics:

• AWStats - 101,789
• Google - 89,901

Question 4: Has the amount of traffic you have received surprised you?

Answer: It was a big surprise to me, because I almost forgot the whole page… The last popular page I had: a joke about vista’s source code, only received 9,240 visitors.

Question 5: Have you ever thought about a career in viral marketing?

Answer: Nope.

Going off this page’s performance, I would definitely be interested in taking this guy on for his social media skills. He is not a professional and as far as I am concerned he hasn’t even marketed the page - One hundred thousand unique visitors and going strong.

Here is a link to the warning page and the 350+ comments at SU.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

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July 14th, 2008 7 Comments

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