My Google Reader – Printing Full Text For All Items post has broken all post view records for my site.
After less than a week it is sitting at second in my Most Viewed section (in the sidebar), behind only my DualFeeds plugin page, which isn’t a post. It took only 3 days to reach 1000 views, while my other 1000+ posts took months to get there. There were 400 views in half a day while it was hot.
Most of the traffic came from StumbleUpon after K-IntheHouse from ShanKri-la stumbled the post. Thanks K!
Interestingly, only one other person added it to their StumbleUpon favourites. I can only imagine the traffic if lots of people added it.
BUT…
Despite all the traffic (1,265 views), the post has only 3 comments. Compare this to my Is It Okay For Plugins To Promote Themselves? post, which has only been viewed 313 times (at time of writing) but has 17 comments.
I guess that’s StumbleUpon traffic for you – quantity not quality.
I think I did get a couple of new comments on other posts from the StumbleUpon crowd, so who knows, I may have got an extra reader or two from it. But the vast majority seem to have come, read and left. It’s like they were never even here.
I am happy for the traffic (I’m not saying don’t stumble me), but I’ll take my regular readers over StumbleUpon traffic any day. That means you!
When I created the program TorPlus, my pageview went as high as 6K. But only for one day. After that everything settled down to normal quickly.
Hi Joyce, 6K is a lot! I just checked what TorPlus is about – seems pretty cool. I use Tor a lot (because I’m in China), but I don’t use Opera. It’d be handy to have it come bundled, especially for the average user.
Opera is my favorite. The latest alpha version of Opera, code named Kestrel, is cool. But there are still many unfixed bugs. Since they haven’t made any release in the last two weeks, I hope they are going to release the beta or full version soon.
Joyce, I’m a Firefox user myself. I’ve heard good things about Opera but I’m not likely to be prised away from Firefox because I rely on the extensions too much!
Firefox is my second choice. I always have a number of tabs open at the same time. firefox requires too much ram, when there is more than 10 tabs open.
Stephen.. sorry for the late response. I have been away for a few days.
I’m glad to see that it brought you some traffic.. I use SU a lot for inspiration as well as just to find some cool sites. As a SU user, I can tell you that indeed it takes a really really good article to make me stop and leave a comment when I am in the ‘Stumble’ mode. But, if I do come across an interesting article or site, I do add it to my Trial folder in Google Reader to give them a week or two to make it to my regular reading.
At the end of the day, extra exposure to our blogs can only be good even if we gather just one reader for a couple of thousand SU views. 🙂
I too find that stumblers rarely post comments. That’s a great amount of traffic from two stumbles, though!
Hi Jacob, thanks for stopping by. Yes, I’m not sure why the traffic was so high, but I’m not complaining. I think the impressions earned me two extra cents from Adsense. 🙂
K, I missed your comment there! I’ve had my head in the plugins lately. Thanks for the insight into the Stumble mode mindset – makes sense. I agree, extra exposure is good, one extra reader per thousand SU views is worth it. I guess if you get stumbled often, your conversion rate might improve – sooner or later some of them will realise they’ve been here before.
I’ve found StumbleUpon to be a very fickle friend. While the visitors from Stumble aren’t great, at least they don’t leave really mean and pointless comments.
CP, true… And I’ve discovered another postive side effect – my Alexa ranking jumped on the back of a couple of stumbles. We all know Alexa is flawed, but it has it’s uses.
Wow, all that traffic from just one stumble.
Dexter, It was pretty amazing…