Chris Pirillo received an interesting call from StumbleUpon’s Director of Advertising Sales the other morning, which was a sales call for advertising within the StumbleUpon social surfing network.
StumbleUpon offers a unique opportunity to reach the targeted audience you’re searching for. Discover great websites, videos, pictures and more-all according to your interests. Send your website or video directly to people who want to see your content. StumbleUpon shows your website or video directly to interested web surfers who have already expressed a strong interest in similar content.
Target the exact audience you want. Target visitors by category, location, age, and gender. Get valuable feedback from real people. See how many people rated your content “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down”. Interested in learning more about StumbleUpon advertising opportunities?
Interesting scenario (kinda reminds me of the old days and eTour.com, remember eTour?) … StumbleUpon users are stumbling upon paid placement possibly without even knowing about it.
But I respect them entirely for putting together an alternative form of revenue generation, which proves that StumbleUpon may indeed be the crop of social bookmarking sites due to its usability and understandability factors.
Sure, the search engines do a terrific job of labeling sponsored links, but how exactly could StumbleUpon label a Sponsored Stumble? A notice on the Toolbar perhaps?
Per the SU website.
How do StumbleUpon members know that my site has been sponsored?
When a person stumbles upon your website, a green button will appear that says “sponsor” and it links to a description of sponsored stumbles located here.
And stumblers can turn the ads off if they become a sponser http://www.stumbleupon.com/sponsored_page.html
Excellent follow-up Jeremy, thank you very much.
Anyone ever advertise with SU? How was your experience?
We advertised our site, http://www.pcnames.com, with stumbleupon and the results were incredible. It was able to bring us over 1,000 targeted unique visitors per day (only counting those who tried one of our tools).
Hey Loren,
As an old eTour employee, I felt obligated to post : )
You’re right though. The eTour advertising platform ran on, what we called, a CPV, or cost per view (typical CPV rate was .25 or so). And we’d randomly insert topically relevant ads in with the regular content rotation from time to time..
the old CEO of eTour is now running SearchIgnite.com, btw..