StumbleUpon, the social discovery service, has about 15 million users. Is it possible it could be directing more traffic to outside websites than Facebook, which has more than 700 million?
That's what StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp claims. In fact, citing data from StatCounter, Camp says his company now generates more more referrals than Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Digg all put together. In the first 18 days of August, it accounted for 50.27 percent of referrals by social media sites, versus less than 39 percent for Facebook.
Given StumbleUpon's mission -- to help users find fresh content on the web -- you'd expect it to generate more referrals per capita than Facebook. But 50 times as many? I found that hard to wrap my head around, so I ran it by the folks at Hitwise, another web tracking service. To keep things manageable for them, and because it's what I'm primarily interested in, I asked about referrals to news and media sites. That's referrals from all sources, not just social networks.
It turns out that, within this subset, at least, Facebook still rules supreme. And it's not close. Facebook accounts for about 6 percent of the referrals to those sites versus less than 1 percent for Twitter, figures (very) roughly in line with those Nielsen found when it asked the same question. StumbleUpon? 0.0099 percent.
Facebook's share of this pie is more consistent with what you'd expect to see from the web's most popular time suck. But the StumbleUpon folks make the case that this is an issue of measurement methodology, with Statcounter's methodology,which relies on a sample of more than 3 million websites using tracking code, providing a more representative picture than Hitwise's, which incorporate's data from ISPs. Essentially, they argue, because StumbleUpon users are so disproportionately active, any sample that misses some of them will vastly underrepresent their impact in driving traffic.
That claim makes sense, insofar as I'm qualified to evaluate it. (Read: not very far.) Still, the claim that tiny StumbleUpon is a more important source of traffic than mighty Facebook needs to be taken with a substantial grain of salt.
