Just viewed Scoble interviewing some of the founders of StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon new and fun videos with this new service:
We sit down with StumbleUpon’s chief architect, Garrett Camp, and David Feller, VP of marketing, and talk about the success Stumbleupon has seen (about 1.5 million users in just a few months) as well as get a look at the new video version of Stumbleupon that opens tonight.

StumbleUpon? Well not exactly. In a world of scarce consumer attention who has time to StumbleUpon? Apparently 1.6 million users do! What the hell do I know?

However, it’s really more like discover relevant content based on attention than Stumble Upon? StumbleUpon attempts to be attention filtered discovery. They have just expanded to video with StumbleUpon Video.

Alex Barnett has a great post here on StumbleUpon here – StumbleVideo – a sign of things to come.

StumbleUpon was recently rumored to be on the block for $50 million! But, If you dig into some of the comments on the TechCrunch post, StumbleUpon (may be) For Sale: $50 million, StumbleUpon’s achilles heel may be exposed.

Mark Suster
Stumbleupon certainly drives traffic to our website (www.koral.com); however, the conversion rate to actual trial customers is 0.91% versus 7-12.5% for most of our other referring sources. So we’re grateful for the brand awareness it creates but if people “stumble upon” your website that doesn’t mean that you are necessarily generating high quality leads. I think people interested in a topic (content management in our case) that self select themselves are clearly more valuable that “lurkers.”

lenkov
We are getting quite a big number of hits from SU, but less than 0.2% from them are actually going beyond the first page.

So it’s very good load generator for your web site (if you want to test if your infrastructure is scalable), but I don’t see any real impact on our business (1K hits from TechCrunch give us more than 100K hits from SU)

Say No to Crack
I agree with others here … we get ~100 hits per day from SU (our silly little humor site only gets 1K hits, so this isn’t bad), but 99%+ of the SU visitors stay for under 30 seconds. Are there other features of SU other than it’s random page stumble toolbar? If not, how could this possibly warrant $50 Million?

How can StumbleUpon be using all this relevant user attention data and the resulting traffic be of such low value to the advertisers buying it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

I think the problem may have to do with their name and resulting consumer positioning. They positioning to consumers (by the name) “Stumble Upon” as the value prop. So what do the users do? Well they continue to Stumble from site to site to site. The rapid fire site discovery is the appeal attracting the users. But of course this is the polar opposite of what their other customer the advertiser wants. So you have this conflict of interest thing going on.

But with 1.6M users you can’t argue that StumbleUpon has hit upon something really appealing to consumers! And…. they are aggregating user attention (attention portalization) to add value for consumers. This is the trend!

Technorati Tags: advertising 2.0, Attention Portalization, Scoble, StumbleUpon, TechCrunch