The Death of StumbleUpon User Ratings?

I’ve been stumbling since September 2005, and never have I found a more effective procrastination tool. To save myself from endless time wasting, I tried hiding the toolbar (never lasted) and disabling the plug-in (lasted about four hours). Finally, I just gave up—I’m a stumbler.

However, finding out that people can buy their way onto StumbleUpon was a bit of a surprise. Maybe it was naive to assume that it wouldn’t contain advertising. StumbleUpon, like many free internet services, costs money to operate. Of course eBay has to pay its bills.

But thumbs-down votes still count for something, right? That’s the beauty of the StumbleUpon. When people started posting those incredibly annoying stumble cards, for instance, I’d like to think I was a small part of down-thumbing them into oblivion. I count myself lucky for every card I didn’t have to see.

Here’s what StumbleUpon says on its About page:

How Does it Work?

StumbleUpon uses [thumbs-up]/[thumbs-down] ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.

As it turns out, thumbs down votes don’t seem to slow down SU views for paid advertisers. Rather, StumbleUpon suggests that thumbs-down votes provide valuable information to advertisers about their content, but never mentions any penalty for receiving thumbs-down votes:

The great thing about StumbleUpon is that our members vote on content that we send to them. Using the StumbleUpon toolbar, you can click either “thumbs-up” to endorse a site (and spread it to like-minded people), or click “thumbs-down” to indicate that it’s not for you. As a website owner, blogger, advertiser, or media buyer, this is potentially very valuable information. You can see what percentage of people rated your content positively, what demographics are performing best, and even read specific written feedback from members.

In other words, StumbleUpon says that thumbs-down votes provide valuable feedback to the advertisers, but it seems that as long as you follow their content guidelines, there is no penalty for adding unpopular content. The post could get plenty of thumb-downs without losing any momentum due to low popularity.

The content guidelines themselves are pretty basic, with no indication that the content needs to be of a high quality. It does forbid:

• spammy/predatory activities (e.g. pyramid schemes, pop ups, making it difficult for users to leave the page, virus-containing downloads)
• age-sensitive or illegal content (e.g. drugs, tobacco, gambling, copyright infringement)
• inflammatory religious content
• exploitation of hot-button political issues for commercial gain
• certain types of personal information collection
• talking about StumbleUpon (unfortunate, this would have been a slightly different article otherwise)

If StumbleUpon has to offer paid advertising, perhaps it should take a cue from Google and start adjusting advertising prices based on quality score. SU is already calculating approval ratings, “the number of thumb-up ratings, divided by the total number of ratings” for a given page.

That way, user votes will still count for something, but SU still has the flexibility to work with advertisers and generate revenue. That’s one idea, anyway—What do you think, any other ideas for monetizing StumbleUpon without messing with the integrity of the rating system?