Tag Archives: StumbleUpon

Media release: StumbleUpon is most important content sharing site for Mail Online

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This Mail Online article was the most shared, the Searchmetrics study found

Fifteen times more links to Mail Online articles are shared worldwide via StumbleUpon than on Twitter, according to a study by Searchmetrics.

During the six month period analysed, just over half (50.78 per cent) of links to Mail Online articles were shared on StumbleUpon, with Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.87 per cent and links on Twitter just 3.21 per cent.

More than half (56.77 per cent) of the Guardian’s social links came from Facebook, with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.35 per cent and Twitter 10.98 per cent, according to the study.

In a release, Dr Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics said:

Some people we have shown this data to have been surprised at the volume of links generated for UK newspapers on the StumbleUpon social bookmarking site. This is a very popular site globally and the links could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use StumbleUpon.

The most frequently shared content on the Mail Online was said to be an article (with images) about the earthquake in Japan which had been shared 392,521 times on the monitored social sites. The Guardian’s most frequently shared content was reportedly a humorous quiz discussing quotes from Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen.

The Mail Online’s top three most frequently shared articles:

1. The big pictures: The moment Japan’s cataclysmic tsunami engulfed a nation = 392,521 links

2. Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat after suspected ‘drug overdose’  = 253,561 links

3. Robber who broke into hair salon is beaten by its black-belt owner and kept as a sex slave for three days… fed only Viagra =

252,650 links

The Guardian’s top three most frequently shared articles:

1. Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? = 363,938 links

2. Detroit in ruins = 210,468 links

3. Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media = 187,987 links

The Mail Online and the Guardian are the most visible UK newspaper websites on social networks such as Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter, according to a separate 10-week study by Searchmetrics, which analysed how often content from 12 leading newspaper sites was shared on six popular social networking and bookmarking sites.

Mail Online came out on top, with links to its pages being shared 2,908,779 times a week on average. The Guardian came second with an average 2,587,258 links being shared on social sites every week.

The Searchmetrics study monitored links shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google+ over a period of 10 weeks.

Average social links per week of UK newspaper websites

Seachmetrics’ CEO Joepen added:

Social news – that is news and articles that are shared or recommended by your friends and followers on social sites – is potentially an important source of traffic for online news sites.

It’s worth noting that search engines, such as Google and Bing are starting to include popularity on social networks as a factor when judging the quality of web pages and how they should be ranked in search listings. So it’s important for news and other web sites to build and monitor visibility on social sites if they want to rank highly and attract visitors via search.

The data for the study was taken from the global social media database which Searchmetrics operates to power its online software tools.

StumbleUpon releases new widget for news sites

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StumbleUpon has released a new widget for news sites and blogs designed to help readers find content that is relevant to them.

It will highlight content that millions users of StumbleUpon, a social aggregator, have recommended and can be used by news outlets to “surface content on the site with the best shelf life”, according to a post on ReadWriteWeb.

The widget comes in three sizes and can be added by copying a simple line of code, as StumbleUpon explains on its blog.

ReadWriteWeb’s post explains why web publishers should sit up, take notice, and consider creating a StumbleUpon widget.

StumbleUpon claims to be the largest non-Facebook referrer of social media traffic. The company is not specific, but that would likely include Twitter, Reddit, Digg, XYDO and other similar tools for publishers. As of April 2010, StumbleUpon funneled twice as much traffic to publishers as Twitter. The user base is predominately between 18 and 34 years old and split 54 per cent male to 46 per cent female.

StumbleUpon has a couple of other publisher products as well, including badges (which look like any normal share button) and a URL shortener (su.pr). The company claims that publishers get 20-25 per cent more traffic from StumbleUpon when they institute badges.

There are a few drawbacks for publishers. A lot of publishers choose to self-aggregate content within posts or certain locations within their sites. The StumbleUpon widget would take that control from them and automate through the company’s index. Another drawback is widget/badge/button fatigue. Share buttons and third-party widgets have to be maintained by publishers and the more of them there are, the more of a time-consuming process it becomes. While the StumbleUpon widget takes up space where there would otherwise be nothing (or unsold ad inventory), it is another piece of real estate on the page.

Increasingly, it is hard to justify clutter for the sake of utilising empty space. Facebook and Twitter both have widgets as well, and those ecosystems have millions more users than StumbleUpon does. Sometimes, simpler is just better.

What do you think? Are you likely to install a StumbleUpon widget? Post your comment below.

Related content:

#su2011: Forget hyperlocal the future’s hyperpersonal

#tfn: Twitter for newsrooms launches – is it useful?

Facebook lessons from Paul Bradshaw and PageLever

Ten things every journalist should know in 2010

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This is an update on a post I wrote at the beginning of last year – Ten things every journalist should know in 2009. I still stand by all those points I made then so consider the following 10 to be an addendum.

1. How to monitor Twitter and other social media networks for breaking news or general conversations in your subject area using tools such as TweetDeck. Understand and use hashtags.

2. You are in control. Don’t become a slave to technology, make it your slave instead. You will need to develop strategies to cope with information overload – filter, filter, filter!

3. You are a curator. Like it or not, part of your role will eventually be to aggregate content (but not indiscriminately). You will need to gather, interpret and archive material from around the web using tools like Publish2, Delicious and StumbleUpon. As Publish2 puts it: “Help your readers get news from social media. More signal. Less noise.”

4. Your beat will be online and you will be the community builder. Creating communities and maintaining their attention will increasingly be down to the efforts of individual journalists; you may no longer be able to rely on your employer’s brand to attract reader loyalty in a fickle and rapidly changing online world (see 7).

5. Core journalistic skills are still crucial. You can acquire as many multimedia and programming skills as you want, but if you are unable to tell a story in an accurate and compelling way, no one will want to consume your content.

6. Journalism needs a business model. If you don’t understand business, especially the business you work for, then it’s time to wake up. The reality for most journalists is that they can no longer exist in a vacuum, as if what they do in their profession is somehow disconnected from the commercial enterprise that pays their wages (one side effect of journalists’ attempts to ‘professionalise’ themselves, according to Robert G Picard). That does not mean compromising journalistic integrity, or turning into solo entrepreneurs; rather it means gaining an understanding of the business they are in and playing a part in moving it forward.

As former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves said in his excellent speech to Warwick Business School last year: “You cannot be an editor in today’s media environment without also being a businessman. It might say editor on my business card, but really, I am in the business of making news profitable and budgets, targets and performance are as important to me as words and newsprint.”

OK, you may not be an editor yet but that is no excuse, and it is probably easier to innovate while you are still working on the coalface without managerial responsibilities. Plus, in some cases, your editor may be part of the problem.

7. You are your own brand – brand yourself online! I’m not talking bylines here – you need to build yourself an online persona, one that earns you a reputation of trustworthiness and one that allows you to build fruitful relationships with your readers and contacts. You can no longer necessarily rely on having a good reputation by proxy of association with your employer’s brand. And your reputation is no longer fleeting, as good as your last big story – there is an entire archive of your content building online that anyone can potentially access. Avodart est un nouveau médicament de marque à base de dutastéride, idéal pour le traitement de l’alopécie androgénique. En réduisant significativement la chute des cheveux, Avodart apporte une contribution significative à la lutte contre la maladie. Dans la pharmacie FFPP Avodart achat lesateliersvortex.com est simple et rapide, sans ordonnance et des prix déraisonnables! Venez faire du shopping.

Obvious ways to do this: Twitter, Facebook, personal blogging, but you can also build a reputation by sharing what you are reading online using social bookmarking sites like Publish2 and delicious (see 3).

8. You need to collaborate! Mashable suggests seven ways news organisations could become more collaborative outside of their own organisations, but this could also mean working with other journalists in your own organisation on, for example, multimedia projects as MultimediaShooter suggests or hook up with other journalists from other publications as Adam Westbrook suggests to learn and share new ideas.

9. Stories do not have to end once they are published online. Don’t be afraid to revise and evolve a story or feature published online, but do it transparently – show the revisions. And don’t bury mistakes; the pressure to publish quickly can lead to mistakes but if you admit them honestly and openly you can only gain the respect of your readers.

10. Technology is unavoidable, but it is nothing to fear and anyone of any age can master the basics. If you do nothing else, set up a WordPress blog and experiment with different templates and plugins – I promise you will be amazed at what you can achieve and what you can learn in the process.

    Learn more practical advice on the future of journalism at our news:rewired event at City University in London on 14 January 2010.

    Malcolm Coles: Telegraph.co.uk gains 8 per cent of traffic from social sites

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    The Telegraph’s website gets eight per cent of its traffic from sites like Digg, delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, its head audience development, Julian Sambles, has said.

    According to Coles’ calculations, this amounts to around 75,000 unique visitors a day gained through social sites.

    Search engines are responsible for around 300,000 daily uniques, Sambles added. Earlier this year Sambles discussed the site’s search strategy at an Association of Online Publishers forum (AOP).

    Full post at this link…

    Innovations in Journalism – tracking conversations and researching stories with YackTrack

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    We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. This week’s starter for ten is the aptly named YackTrack, designed to find info related to a single issue across various sites.

    1) who are you and what’s it all about?
    YackTrack is a service written by Rob Diana that allows a user to enter the URL of an article or blog post they want to find conversations about.

    The conversations can be occurring on blogs (WordPress only so far), Digg, Mixx, Technorati (in the form of “blog reactions”), Disqus, StumbleUpon (in the form of “reviews”) and FriendFeed.

    2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
    Based on the feedback I am receiving it seems to be useful to almost anyone. For a journalist, you can pick up a story from another site and run it through YackTrack, then get the all comments [made about the story] from other sites.

    Most important in that list are the links you can get from services like Technorati. Those links are really just other articles or
    blog posts talking about the same topic. If the topic if popular enough, you can grab several URLs from a service like TechMeme and run all of them through YackTrack and you could get a really good list of researchable articles.

    3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
    Yes there is more to come. Some things I cannot really talk about yet (as there has to be some suspense) and others are fairly straightforward.

    Registration and saving of URLs to track are a logical step forward. RSS and email notifications are also a popular request. More service support is necessary as well. I have also had requests for blog plugins, specifically WordPress.

    4) Why are you doing this?
    A few weeks ago, there were a number of blog posts on where comments were being posted and whether the fragmented conversation was a good thing.

    I think the fragmentation leads to more thought provoking conversations, but many bloggers do not know that their post was submitted to Mixx, Digg or StumbleUpon. Given that different sites have different cultures I thought it would be really interesting to have all of the conversations visible in one spot. I am getting the feeling that other people feel the same way.

    5) What does it cost to use it?
    Right now it does not cost anything to use. The service is simple to use and I would like to keep it available in that way.

    6) How will you make it pay?
    I would like the service to pay for its own hosting, but I do not really want to charge the users. I do have Google AdSense on the site now, but that is more to see if there is any minimal revenue available.

    I am going to be looking at direct advertising as a revenue stream as well, as that could cover the hosting fees as well.