In case you are not familiar with the concept, StumbleUpon allows you to pay for visitors to your pages, five cents per visitor or click. The question is, do you consider this to be a simple form of paid advertising, or paid social bookmarking.
On a simple level, it is just paid advertising and not social bookmarking. If you set a limit of $20 per day, you will get 400 visitors. They may stay on your page or they may spend five seconds and dissapear.
Where the situations changes is when they thumbs up your page. That’s a stumble and can lead to more than just the 400 visitors. Once you start to get votes your page is treated the same as any other page – he more thumbs up – the more visitors you are likely to get. That, however is still not the real concept of social bookmarking.
The real issue is if you are lucky enough to get a review with the thumbing. Now you have a social bookmark in place and it has started through a paid campaign. Social bookmarking is all about getting as many of those ‘real’ votes, that is reviews, as possible.
So are paid ‘stumbles’ just plain promotion or a part of social bookmarking? Does it matter? You could be using any form of paid per click advertising, a social bookmark is a social bookmark. Not a cheap method to get that bookmark and there are no guarantees of getting ‘reviewed’, however if you are simply after traffic, the bookmark may be a nice bonus.
