Received an IM yesterday afternoon via Skype from Chris Pirillo asking me if I saw his bit about StumbleUpon (SU). I replied that I hadn’t and didn’t really follow up to find out what he meant at the moment. I showed Chris SU at the first Northern Voice conference, so I guessed that was partly what prompted this message out of the blue.

This morning I saw that he was contacted to advertise on SU and didn’t seem to realize that some of the results stumblers are being shown are paid, sponsored listings. As one of Chris’ commenters already points out, this has been happening for a long time and you can become a paying member and block seeing those stumbles.

To answer Chris’ question that he never really asked me (the dude’s like that): yes, I know some results are paid, targeted stumbles and I still donated to their cause quite awhile ago. I’m kind of surprised Chris didn’t realize this was happening (?) and not sure by his post if he dislikes this practice or not, or is simply questioning if this practice makes the service “real or fake.”

I don’t think inserting a small — keyword small — number of paid stumbles into the results makes SU ‘fake’ any more than the Pay Per Post review place is inherently bad as some have made it out to be. The key to all this stuff is proper disclosure. If people are using SU and don’t realize that some of the results are from paid sponsors, at least posts like Chris made and this one help get the word out so it’s more clear.

Bottom line: SU is a surfing toolbar in your browser that is used to discover and share stuff that might be of interest to you and others. I’ve used it on and off — mostly on — since January 18, 2004 and for those interested that want to see my stumble activity and history can follow my tdavid.stumbleupon.com page. You can sign up and share your SU activity if you like without paying a dime. You can also optionally pay $20 a year and turn off viewing sponsored stumbles. If someone pays that fee and is still seeing sponsored stumbles then please let me know.

Update 7:18am PST: via WikiPedia the number of sponsored pages is less than 2%: “StumbleUpon uses knowledge of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising. A small proportion of the ’stumbles’ users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest.”

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