Riding The StumbleUpon Wave

Unreality Music is currently experiencing a massive traffic spike courtesy of the StumbleUpon community. It's all centered around a post I wrote almost a fortnight ago after Dr Pepper publicly teased Axl Rose about his ability to release an album.

I submitted the post myself, thinking that I'd done a pretty good job writing the post. I'd been snarky and - in my opinion - pretty funny. So, feeling good about the article, I submitted it to StumbleUpon. There was a minor spike in traffic to the blog for a while afterward, but nothing special, so I forgot about it. You win some, you lose some.

Aftershock

Well, I was sitting in the kitchen yesterday evening and I absent-mindedly checked the stats on Unreality Music. To my mild surprise, I'd already had more than my usual amount of traffic for the day. I put it down to the fact that I'd posted more than usual that day and went about my business.

However, later that night I checked again and the pageviews were in the 8,000's. The whole day ended with well over 12,000 pageviews and nearly 9,000 unique visitors. A check of stats this morning showed that we're on track to surpass yesterday's figures by midday if the Stumble effect continues. My stats software is telling me that the post is now one of my all-time most visited with almost 18,000 pageviews.

I think what's surprising is that the post is now old news. My feeling is that it's the sarcastic tone which people are liking and choosing to thumb up. Last time I looked, there were three new reviews on the StumbleUpon page for my article and over 40 approves.

Effects Of A Good Stumbling

Although we run AdSense on the site, the massive spike in traffic had absolutely no effect on revenue. I'm not particularly bothered about this aspect though. I'd prefer to gain readership and mindshare for the blog. And possibly a few more StumbleUpon regulars who'll submit my posts from time to time!

I was slightly disappointed at the rate of pageviews per user. I was hoping that a lot of the readers would have stuck around and read some of the other material on the site. Despite the related posts and latest articles on the sidebar, they didn't. I'll know over the next couple of days if I've had a related increase in RSS subscribers.

On the subject of money: I'd happily switch off adverts on the site for the duration of a Stumble wave if it helped build awareness of the site and increase our readership. I'm definitely of the opinion that brand awareness is more important than revenue sometimes. And I think Unreality Music has the potential to be a fairly unique mainstream music blog if we play our cards right.

More thoughts on building readership later.