Evidently StumbleUpon has been doing some heavy duty spring cleaning, banning some users from the system. I would generally pass this kind of news without paying too much attention to it. However, there is one thing puzzled me a bit. Namely their PPC advertising. I advertised using this option a little. I don’t remember spending more that $200 on their ads due to the low conversion rates.
So StumbleUpon wants their users to submit pages about dogs and cats and and then they offer you to create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to those pages. But if you submit a page that actually is made to make you money, you are braking their TOS? Are you kidding me? I don’t understand the logic. If you do please enlighten me.
Here is one more account for you to ban http://vladtheaffiliate.stumbleupon.com – I probably have broken your TOS, besides I don’t need your traffic. You can have it all.
I lately have come to realize that all the posts about StumbleUpons quality of traffic are bunch of BS. If their traffic was so good people would exit AdWords in thousands. The truth is StumbleUpon’s traffic does not convert and can actually hurt your AdSense earnings. I also have not seen a single conversion from their PPC. I don’t even know why do people even bother using their PPC. Spend that money in AdWords at least the traffic from Google converts better.
I guess you can call it a rant day???
I've found that SU traffic is good only in the sense that it gets people there. For someone like me who's mostly looking for exposure at this point, I don't mind casting a wide net to catch only a few fish 🙂
I don't mind the SU traffic at all, I have benefited from it in the past and
still do. But I think the fact that they offer PPC is inconsistent with
banning some of us who stumbles a page that has purely commercial goal…
Again do they expect me to pay for clicks to pages about my cats and dogs?
It should be noted that I have written above post in a wave of emotions. 🙂
Hey Vlad,
Interesting. I guess like many marketers that means I have fallen foul of the TOS myself – but they do have a “marketing” category which is where most of my stumbles end up. If a user Stumbles something to promote a third party website that is commercial in nature but in which they have no financial I don't see the logic of labeling them as an “abuser” of the system.
I know self promotion is frowned upon but I've stumbled several of my own blog posts in the past if I think they are deserving of the exposure. I don't do it to excess. The thing is, where do you draw the line? The Internet is commercial in nature, so by the anti commercial/marketing crowd's standards, any website or blog carrying even one advertisement should be banned from places like SU along with any person who thumbs that site up? Ok I'm exaggerating, but we're discussing illogical reasoning and that is a logical opposing argument.
There are too many haters on SU nowadays and too many people who seem to feel that nobody is interested in any kind of commercial or money making online ventures just because it offends their own strange sensibilities. It's a shame, but it's going the way of Digg and after seeing one particular attack on a female internet marketer involving truly unpleasant verbal abuse it made me wonder just what kind of people would want to play in that environment. After all, if you're not interested in a site it takes a fraction of a second to pass on to the next.
I don't think if I ended up with a ban that I'd lose too much sleep over it. Most SU users spend less than 30 seconds on my site so I can only conclude that my content is not what most SU users are looking for.
Maurice,
I think some of use may get caught up in this “social media traffic” fix. No
matter how do we twist nothing can beat natural search from big 3 (G, Y,
MSN) and the PPC on these three as well.
Thanks for stopping by on my new blog.