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 23 Comments
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July 14th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Hehe, that’s nice! He made a really viral page.
July 15th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
This is one of those examples that makes you think – why didn’t I think of that!
Create piece of viral marketing – has he got any other random thoughts of genius that he may like to share lol?
July 16th, 2008 at 5:04 am
VIRAL MARKETING! BAHAHA
July 18th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I remember when I first saw that page, I fell for it too! There’s lots of copycat versions around now that can get a little irritating! Still, was brilliant
July 18th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
I fell hard. I linked to your article.
http://www.laurinandkellytalk.com/test_blog/2008/07/how-to-surf-ets.html
July 18th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Hi Laurin, thanks for dropping by and thankyou so much for linking to this really long URL.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
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August 27th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
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October 4th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
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October 25th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
What a brilliant idea, I will definitely be trying this out in future, imagine how many people Stumbled this page, WOW.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
As it name implies, viral marketing proves to be an effective way to propagate information of all sorts. Stumbleupon is one of the most effective social media which is very successful in implementing massive information dissemination on their users. Good job for them.
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:22 am
Amazing and it is a good idea for viral marketing.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:08 am
hey this is nice post,well informative about viral marketing.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
[...] this was not an official warning from StumbleUpon but a prank page created by some anonymous user. Lot of other people seem to think that this is real and the site is therefore a big hit already at [...]
January 15th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
[...] this was not an official warning from StumbleUpon but a prank page created by some anonymous user. Lot of other people seem to think that this is real and the site is therefore a big hit already at [...]
January 20th, 2009 at 5:29 am
[...] use”. Luckily, this was not an official warning from StumbleUpon but a prank page created by some anonymous user. Lot of other people seem to think that this is real and the site is therefore a big hit already at [...]
January 20th, 2009 at 7:27 am
[...] this was not an official warning from StumbleUpon but a prank page created by some anonymous user. Lot of other people seem to think that this is real and the site is therefore a big hit already at [...]
January 27th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
[...] this was not an official warning from StumbleUpon but a prank page created by some anonymous user. Lot of other people seem to think that this is real and the site is therefore a big hit already at [...]
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I have never heard of Viral Marketing before but its grabbed my attention, and I have a question or two that hopefully you can give me some answers to. This fake page how would the volume of visits effect the site that it was a part of, would it help to push up the page rank of the whole site or just the fake page? Also how did the fake page get viewed?
March 21st, 2009 at 9:46 pm
This is how i see seo moving. Becoming far more creative…moving into the art more than science.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:46 pm
that’s nice! He made a really viral page.
try to do more struggling ………lol
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:58 pm
What a brilliant idea, I will definitely be trying this out in future, imagine how many people Stumbled this page, WOW.
September 10th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
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Cheers for this post, guys, retain up the excellent operate….