ProBlogger Darren Rowse made an interesting discovery when he took a closer look at his blog’s metrics: one of his blog posts received more traffic from StumbleUpon than from Digg — but he had to take a long view of the data.
What made Rowse’s revelation interesting was that, in the short run, he received nearly three times more traffic to the post in question from Digg than from StumbleUpon. However, when he checked back 43 days later, he discovered that StumbleUpon surpassed Digg’s total traffic by more than 1,000 views.
The Lesson: My guess is that most of us news types like to check how hot a story is either the day it breaks or within the next few days. However (for those of you whose content sticks around the site for a while), make sure to check the metrics a few months later. You may be surprised at how much traffic you get in the long run, as well as where it’s coming from.
[Via JournalismHope]
That’s “the long tail” in action. Some content really has legs. I think Digg is much more skewed toward “what is hot right now” and StumbleUpon is much more random, allowing us to discover stuff we missed when it was hot (and fodder for Digg).
Although a curious thing about StumbleUpon traffic is that it comes in waves.
The few times I’ve gotten major traffic from StumbleUpon, it’s come shortly after the story was first “stumbled.” Hundreds or thousands of readers will visit the page for a few days until everyone runs out of steam.
Then I won’t get a single hit from StumbleUpon for a few days, and then a handful of people will trickle in every few days.
A month later, someone else might discover and like the article that was first submitted, and the whole thing starts over again.