A Thumbs Down Kills Stumble Traffic
- 27 Comment
Yesterday I wrote about how you can Earn Money for your Social Media Votes. People are willing to pay you to vote for your votes. I thought it would be a great article for getting a little stumble traffic. However, a thumbs down killed it.
The topic of selling your votes is a controversial one, especially to social media users. In the article I never stated I was for or against it (I did plug my referral link), but I was mostly interested in if the readers here would buy or sell.
I completely understand why it could of gotten a thumbs down and they left their reason.
“You know, I’m probably one of the most capitalistic women I know, but this is just wrong. Are you really that desperate for $10 to put your integrity on the shelf?”
However, they either didn’t fully read the article, or I was misunderstood. As I said before I never said I was for or against it. Maybe it was the title?
The Thumbs Down Effect
I’ve gotten a thumbs down before by crazy, angry, stumble trolls. The posts were old, but received a trickle of hits every now and then. Ever since the thumbs down, traffic has ceased.
The case is the same on yesterdays article, thumbs down killed off all traffic. It had 15 stumbles including my own. Instead of receiving the usual couple of hundred stumble hits, I registered 26. It is still getting thumbs up, but no impact.
I thought it would be interesting to contact the stumbler, nicely of course. I asked them why they gave the thumbs down and their opinion. I haven’t received a response yet, but definitely hope that I can change their mind. It will be interesting to also see if traffic picks up again.
What do you do when your articles on stumbleupon get thumbs down? Have you tried to contact the stumbler?
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27 Comments on this post
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Erica said:
Does a thumbs down kill traffic? I have to disagree. We have a post that has been stumbled over 50,000 times since February 4th (omg ridiculous) and has received numerous negative stumbles – mainly because the story behind the pictures is bogus. (My sister had no idea when she posted it – she just thought the pictures were cute). 43 reviews, 10 are thumbs down. Yet we are still receiving on average 2-3 thousand hits daily from SU.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/fiveblondes.com/pigs/the-world-is-amazing/
February 26th, 2008 at 11:57 am -
Matthew Henrickson said:
wow thats a lot of hits. thanks for your post, ill go check that out 🙂
I stumbled it as well, pretty cool 🙂 dun dun dun, tiger pigs!
February 26th, 2008 at 12:10 pm -
unTECHy said:
@ Erica:
Wow, 50K stumbles on one post? That’s crazy.February 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
that is crazy, i wouldnt mind some of that action
February 26th, 2008 at 12:22 pm -
Forest Parks said:
Strangely I still have not worked out how to fully use Stmbleupon! I don’t know how to tell if my articles have been stumbled or how they are doing!
February 26th, 2008 at 12:33 pm -
Adam said:
Some people are plain selfish. They disagree with what most people have to say.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:45 pm -
sir jorge said:
I thumbs down a lot of stupid content.
Never yours though 😉
February 26th, 2008 at 1:21 pm -
hobs said:
Stumbleupon is supposed to learn your preferences, for instance I dont like blogs that whine about one person thumbs downing their blog.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:58 pm -
Tay - Super Blogging said:
I have received some pointless thumbs downs before as well, based on incorrect assumptions from that stumbler. I once wrote an article about using images in blog posts to have a better looking blog and gain more traffic, and someone (not a blogger or anyone who knows much about having a site at all obviously) got furious at the thought of using images and thought I was trying to game StumbleUpon and cheat people with them. Utterly ridiculous, makes me laugh to think about it.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:40 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
lol@ hobs, yes I really am whining.
I thought I had comments disabled for those whining about posts about whining about getting a thumbs down. ?
I thumbs down as well, I’m trying to find the traffic aspect of it 😉
February 26th, 2008 at 4:59 pm -
James @ Total Web Review said:
It is very possible that the thumb downer just read the title and based their opinion on that. The title can be rather misleading.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:17 pm -
RandomThinker said:
When I’m stumbling and I run across a page that I neither like or dislike, I tend not to do anything. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. Just because I don’t like the page, doesn’t mean someone else won’t. I do gives thumbs up to pages I like quite often, but reserve the thumbs down only for something that’s really terrible.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:13 pm -
Daan Jansonius said:
I usually don’t thumb things down unless they are blatant promotional material as I suspected this.
But I thought it was also for SU to get a better idea of your preferences and adjust the sites you see accordingly. But these two things contradict eachother and don’t go hand in hand.
BTW, SU is a great little traffic driver….300 people at least every single time
February 27th, 2008 at 3:31 am -
Jay said:
Honestly man, there are TONS of Stumblers that just give thumbs down on a majority of stuff they stumble upon. If they’re just going to do that, they might as well not be on there.
I’ve had a couple of thumbs down on my StumbleUpon profile calling me a spammer or some other names. Then when I check their profile, a majority of people gave them thumbs down.
Jay
DatMoney.comFebruary 27th, 2008 at 7:25 am -
Internet Marketing Joy said:
Luckily, I haven’t really experienced getting a thumbs down. I just hope your traffic will pick up again.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:45 am -
George said:
I’ve found this to not be true as well. I’ve got a piece of stumblebait at 30k stumbles and counting, and yet the first 3 reviews were negative (all 45 since have been positive).
I think it has a lot to do with who thumbs down the article – if its someone that thumbs everything down SU isn’t going to give a lot of importance to it. The stumblers who thumbed down the article I mentioned did so to many other articles.
Every stumbler has an audience score, just like Digg or any other social media site. Its basically just a determination of distance from center. So the opinions (positive or negative) of the stumbler will be given a weight proportional to to their distance from center.
Of course, I don’t work at SU so I don’t really know how it works – just my experience.
To answer your question though: I will mark the negative review as vulgar, spam, or not helpful if applicable. I do not know if this lessens the impact of the thumbs down. However, I’ve never gone so far as to contact the stumbler.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:08 am -
Shanker Bakshi said:
thats a bad if someone wishing to sell his/her votes.
February 28th, 2008 at 7:54 pm -
Beth said:
There are groups who will either pay, or get together with other groups to thumbs up a Stumble no matter the content. I’ve read this on other blogs and hey- if you want to cheat your way to traffic- be my guest. It’s just like any other networking site. I rarely use StumbleUpon, although I did quite a bit in the beginning. I’ve had a lot of my posts Stumbled, and while I didn’t get 50,000 in one shot, I receive residual traffic, which in the long run to me is more important.
February 28th, 2008 at 9:27 pm -
Jenny said:
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a thumbs down on anything. I could be wrong. I’m to lazy to check. But I totally didn’t know a thumbs down could screw you. Wow. I’ll have to remember this.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:05 am -
Stephan Miller said:
I have had an SU account since 2004. There is a tight group of stumblers that think that SU should be marketing free and will thumb down anything that sells to them.
It’s just the odds that if your post gets popular, one of these people will find it.March 5th, 2008 at 9:10 am -
Delores said:
Scary to think that someone would want to give you the “thumbs down” and kill your rise to Stumbling fame that easily.
Sort of off the subject but, I notice that you use Sphinn for each of these entries. Have you had any problems getting into your account at the Sphinn site? I had an account that I could not access and never, ever, got a response from them about resetting a password. I tried to set up another account and it worked fine for about ten minutes and now, again, I cannot log in and cannot get a password request sent to me via email.
Sorry, just had to ask/vent…March 8th, 2008 at 8:48 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
No Delores, I haven’t had any sphinn trouble. Sorry that you have!
I haven’t heard of anyone with that problem either. Have you tried support?
March 8th, 2008 at 9:17 pm -
Delores said:
Thanks for the reply, Matthew. Yes, I’ve tried contacting support numerous times. I have never received a response. I’ve checked my email settings and my Spam folder but, yet, no messages received from Sphinn. Very frustrating indeed.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:44 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
If there is anything I can do let me know. I would suggest writing an article and having someone submit it for you (I will).
That might work?
March 9th, 2008 at 2:50 pm -
Delores said:
Ooh, very nice idea. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in my blog at all yet. If you’re up for the challenge of seeing if anyone else has had problems with Sphinn, I’m very grateful for the help. I kept thinking I would, one day, write an entry to submit for “Blog About Your Blog” but since you have some tenure here, feel free to quote me if you wish. Ha ha. 🙂 Thanks again.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:53 pm -
Stumble Upon Genius said:
StumbleGenius Stumbling on thru, StumbleUpon thumbs up to you, hope to see you in more clicky stumble trips soon. Happy day merry seasons greetings an all that jazz.
Read you later or tweet me on Twitter @StumbleGenius … tweet you soon ???
Stumble Upon Geniuss last blog post..ROR Sitemap for http://stumblegenius.com/
November 29th, 2008 at 12:45 pm -
G Money said:
Wow. I haven’t really experienced getting a thumbs down either. I don’t have a fantastic amount of traffic, but I do get mostly positive responses to my posts. I never thumb down anything either. There’s enough people out there policing, they don’t need me too add to the mix.
January 24th, 2011 at 2:51 pm