My love hate relationship with Stumble Upon.

I do really like the traffic that a good stumble or two can bring to my sites, but the short term effect can really put your AdSense profits in the dog house. There are many days where due to stumbling my AdSense profits plummet. For one of my sites I make about $5 per 1500 uniques, which equates to approximately 25 AdSense clicks. On a day when I really get smacked by stumble google drops the PPC way down. Today as an example I am making about $1.20 per 1500 uniques for approximately 25 AdSense clicks.

I have decided to stop pushing the reddit, digg, netscape, and Stumble Upon angle except for picking up new readership. I am going to limit it to once a month, and that will be only if I need it. If it happens on its own then that is fine, but as far as me pimping my own site on a regular bases… I am out. I find that once a really good stumble gets started it can take well more than a week to die back down, so pretty much my profits drop over %70 for that week period.

In one respect I would like to do away with ever being stumbled. I really don’t have any hard proof of this, but I find when I have not been stumbled or dugg for several weeks that google starts throwing the really high dollar ads my way. I have found that when my site moves to all bookmark, rss, and organic traffic for a period of a week or more that I start hitting those coveted ads worth $2, $3 or more per click.