StumbleUpon is one of the sites that can bring a heap of new visitors to your site. I’ve seen 18,000 page views in a single day on one of my sites, all traffic from StumbleUpon. The number of visitors that came to my site from StumbleUpon decreased considerably over the next couple of days, but I was still getting over 1,000 visitors a day for about a month.

We all want traffic, right? Well, actually, most webmasters think it’s all about the number of visitors, but what they really want is to make some money from ads running on their site. If you are running AdSense ads on your site, StumbleUpon traffic, or rather social media traffic in general, is no money maker. If you want to get a good return on all that free traffic, you have to know who your visitors are!


So, who is stumbling? Your typical StumbleUpon user is not as easily described as the average Digg user. StumbleUpon has a much broader user base than Digg. You can find any kind of people on StumbleUpon, which of them get send to your website depends on the category that your site was submitted to.

One thing that can be said about StumbleUpon users is that they are bored, not boring, just bored. See, the whole point of StumbleUpon is to give bored people something to do on the web.

I know I’ve spend countless times staring at a search engine, trying to figure out what I wanted to search for. I didn’t have anything better to do, and just wanted to browse the ‘net, but I had no idea where to start.

Today, whenever I feel like just browsing the web, with no particular goal in mind, I just hit the Stumble! button in my browser and I will be taken to an interesting site. I’ve put the subjects I’m interested in into my profile page, so the system knows what I like and doesn’t send me to just any random website.

When you get visitors from StumbleUpon to your website, you know they are people that are interested in the topic of your site, you also know that they are bored and where not looking for your website in particular. Visitors from search engines came to your site by searching for something that is on your site, they will probably also click on your AdSense ads, because the ads show links to sites on a similar topic. StumbleUpon visitors will not click the ads on your site, when they are done reading, they click on the Stumble! button to be send to the next website.

A few might click an ad, bookmark your site or even subscribe to your rss feed, but most of them will not. The best thing they can do, is give your site a thumb-up, so it will be send to more StumbleUpon users. So, if you are enjoying this post, please give me a thumb up!

What about other ways to make money from the StumbleUpon traffic? Your best bet would probably be CPM ads, these are ads that pay for each time it is viewed, instead of requiring a click to make money. This depends on your websites topic however, I’m mostly writing for webmasters and they are generally more web-savvy than your average visitor on other sites. Most of my visitors use the Firefox browser and I’m pretty sure a lot of them have some ad-blocking extensions installed, so they will never see the CPM ads, and will not make me any money.