StumbleUpon Graveyard
February 8, 2008 — Tim Nash
A few things will kill a stumble, sending no traffic and sending the page to a quiet death. I present for your horror the StumbleUpon Graveyard and how posts are dragged down to its bowels, I will even provide tips to avoid such a fate..
Reviews do have meaning
Without an initial review almost no traffic is sent, nor does your post pick up traction amongst other regular stumblers who are looking in their recent reviews as your post is not there for them to find. So how could someone stumble a site but not leave this vital review?
I don’t want to be the first
This is probably the most common way to get a post into the graveyard, the timid stumbler likes your amazing post and hits the thumbs up. They are presented with the discovery dialogue and panic! What if no one else likes it, what if I made a mistake, I best just go and cancel it! Now normally this is not a problem but it would seem some of the toolbars have a small bug counting the thumbs up and creating an entry then discounting the thumbs up but leaving the entry still intact. The result….
Problem is without testing every toolbar version on every platform we can’t be sure this is a bug but for those interested when you thumb something up the following HTTP is sent
rating=1&url=URLSubmitted&charset=UTF-8&
referer=http%3A//www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php%3F
url%3DURLSubmitted%252F&version=mozbar%203.16%20xpi&
;username=UserID&password=myencoded password
When you thumb up a yet undiscovered page the same initial data is sent, once StumbleUpon server realises its a new URL it requests you send data to www.stumbleupon.com/newurl.php initially this is just the rating, url and page title. You are then presented with the discovery panel and asked for tags etc. Clicking submit sends a Post request with all the information.
I think (and emphasis on the think) on some Toolbars that when you cancel it does not send a cancel signal back to StumbleUpon the result is your review is never published, your thumb is not counted but the site has been discovered and StumbleUpon is waiting for information about the initial stumbler.
Other Graveyard methods
‘SendTo’ use to be such a great thing, you could send messages to all your friends begging (sorry suggesting) great pages and we all know that this has been devalued but it still is useful to send your friends ‘SendTo’s after all a friend is much more likely to write a review which will be seen by their friends etc etc. The problem comes we often want to send people ‘SendTo’ about our great content without actually thumbing the page ourselves. StumbleUpon allows us to ‘SendTo’ on any page regardless if we actually thumbed it up so temptation is there.
Can you guess what happens if you use ‘SendTo’ on a page which has yet to be discovered and has no thumbs up…
Once again StumbleUpon has a “discovered page” i.e its in the database but with no one to associate as the first stumbler result a graveyard page.
How to avoid graveyard pages
As a page owner their is little you can do about Graveyard pages except shrug however in general:
- Only use ‘SendTo’ after the page has been discovered, and for maximum effect thumb the page first
- When you discover a page don’t stop halfway through write that review!
- Make sure you are using the latest Toolbar
- Don’t place StumbleUpon buttons on your page, while StumbleUpon provides them they effectively castrate a stumble as when some one discovers a page via these buttons they do not send that all important thumbs up
Will Stumble Grave Posts bring traffic?
A trickle but no where near what it would have done if the page had been discovered properly, for maximum traffic the Discoverer needs to have both thumbed up and Discovered the page (i.e from the toolbar) the next best thing is to discover via a button and the worst thing is to have a record in the db and no discoverer.
Can I do something?
Not really if the post proves popular and enough visitors thumb it up it will gain some traffic and more importantly may get several smaller waves in the future but these will be ghostly imitations of what it could have been.
Happy stumbling 
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February 8, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Tim,
Great analysis. It seems to be a growing trend for stumblers discovering a page to not give it a review. I had wondered what type of impact not having a review would have on the discovered page.
February 8, 2008 at 10:37 pm
[...] earlier today wrote about how content can end up in "The Stumbleupon Graveyard" through various bugs. It is actually quite a major problem that can prevent exceptional [...]
February 10, 2008 at 8:00 pm
[...] StumbleUpon Graveyard Author: Tim Nash of BlogVentureSkills.co.uk Outlines the ways that web pages can end up in the StumbleUpon Graveyard and how to avoid it. [...]
February 12, 2008 at 10:42 am
What a great post about StumbleUpon. If a page is good I’ll leave a review. Others should do the same.
February 14, 2008 at 3:19 pm
great post. I ‘ve wondered about some of those quirks you metnioned. I use the send to function all the time whether or not something has been stumbled.
February 14, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Wow, this is an amazing post and has given me a lot to think about. Reviews probably do have more weight than just stumbles, which is why I’ve seen some odd performance on some things I submitted.
Another strange phenomenon that I’ve never been able to explain is why in my traffic a 5 month old post can seem still popular, but have no (or almost no) thumbs up. Any ideas on this one?
By the way, I like your blog
February 15, 2008 at 1:33 am
Thanks for the tips, I’m newer to Stumble and this is helpful. I’ve already left reviews after reading this
February 15, 2008 at 9:40 am
@TzuVelli - While its nearly impossible to gather stats on an exact number I wrote a script for my tester group who work for me without telling them what I was researching and they cancelled a discovery 1 in 6 times. Now these are savy stumblers but as it wasn’t in the wild I didn’t include the stat.
@Austin - While leaving a review is appreciated by all the only critical review is that first one. Speaking from a personal perspective while I appreciate stumblers reviews I sometimes they also added their comments on the post to help the conversation just like you have done.
@Matt - so it’s all your fault! on a serious note using the SendTo function without it first being stumbled seems to cause a pretty nasty glitch that is almost impossible to get out off.
@Troy - After a certain length of time, the stumble is reset and so the next stumbler to arrive at the page is treated as if they discovered the page (though minus the dialog) and cause a new stumble wave.
@Dara -
Keep reviewing
February 15, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Wow, that’s odd
February 16, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Very insightful stuff Tim. Thank you.
February 20, 2008 at 5:25 am
[...] I needed them to do for me. The post got reviewed but without a Thumbs Up and so it ended up in the StumbleUpon Graveyard. This was not my friends fault. It was my fault. I was not clear on what I needed. To get it out of [...]
February 22, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Wonderfully explained!
So much so, that I see you as a guru after this single visit and couldn’t resist asking this question.
If I was a Stumbleupon coder. Sitting thinking of ways and algorithms to judge the value of content, I’d want to make sure people weren’t getting thumb-happy.
And this would be based upon content. If you stumbled (via the toolbar button rather than your own endeavours), or found a page someone else you know had reviewed, then I’d want to know how much of the review was read before you hit the thumbs up.
If it was text-based content, I’d value that thumbs up more - i.e. I’d be more confident it had been read. If it was within a few seconds, I’d give less weighting to the value of the stumble.
If it was a photo however, people may click sooner. So, when a page is first submitted, I would make sure the page is assessed. If it’s a short sentence - perhaps an inspirational quote for example - then I’d want to “word count” the text and come up with a minimum reading time for that page before the stumble button is pressed.
So if it was a 3 or 4 scroll page crammed with text, the stumble has more weight if perhaps the reading time is say more than 3 minutes. Even more if the reading time is longer.
I don’t think it should be all of the algorithm - what’s preventing people stumbling on the page, and then the phone rings. Ten minutes later they sit back down and “thumb” THEIR FRIENDS page without reading it.
This is all speculation - I’ve only really been using stumble for a few days. Like the geek I am (amateur!), I idle away hours of usefless thought on stuff like this!
Any idea if my theories have any grounding?
February 23, 2008 at 7:57 pm
[...] The StumbleUpon Graveyard - an interesting and technical post from Tim Nash of the Venture Skills blog that explains some little quirks within the StumbleUpon system that can cause a page not to be registered properly and thus not generate traffic. Make sure you don’t make the mistakes explained in here. [...]
March 3, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Hi Tim, thanks for the details on this issue. One question I have….in #4, you suggest that you don’t put a SU button on your page….what about the gregarious plugin for wordpress, is that OK? Also, what about using the feedburner feedflare….it shows up in either your feed or at the top of your post if you use their code.
I used to have the feedflare at the top of my posts (gave options to stumble, email, or save to delicious), I don’t have it enabled right now, but I am using gregarious at the bottom of my posts.
Thank you very much!
March 4, 2008 at 9:46 am
@ian check out the StumbleUpon Math post your idea has some grounding.
@JoLynn I try to avoid all buttons or links to review pages on StumbleUpon including Feedflare not sure how much use such things get, maybe an idea for some tracking there.
Basically you want the user to use the toolbar
nothing else, of course a link to your profile never goes a miss.
March 4, 2008 at 10:37 am
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March 5, 2008 at 7:13 pm
[...] but doesn’t really say what it is, only that traffic can just stop. In actual fact there are several reasons why StumbleUpon Traffic could come to a halt and these are not mentioned in the [...]
March 8, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Hmmm…good to know Tim. I was wondering why a lot of our pages did not show a discoverer (and were often mis-catagorized). I also believe it might be happening when I hit the “reviews of this page” button to see if anyone has discovered a post yet.
Several of our top posts have actually been discovered by “someone”, so it is possible to be rescued from the “graveyard” by having quality content that people like. I would be interested to know the difference in what could have been if the discoverer was listed.
Oh the site is realitycrowd.com if anyone is interested. Our top “graveyard” post is one about quantum physics that has risen from the dead to get about 3000 hits from SU.
June 11, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Thanks for this post Tim! I’ve always wondered about that, and wasn’t sure if a review was important or not. Personally, I review every site I give thumbs up to, basically because I think it’s the right thing to do. Turns out, it’s more important than I thought. Anyway, I stumbled and reviewed this post