How Do I Add Pages to StumbleUpon?

Happy Monday everyone! To start off the week, we wanted to demystify two areas of StumbleUpon that we get asked about a lot: how web pages end up in StumbleUpon, and how you can add pages yourself.

How do pages make it into StumbleUpon’s collection?

We don’t crawl the web for content, but instead let you, our users, recommend the pages YOU like to us. That means all content in StumbleUpon – 50,000 new pages every day – is handpicked and endorsed by real people. Think of it as natural selection for the Internet, where the best of the web gets submitted to our directory, mostly because all of you find great content and want to share it with the rest of us. What this also means is that growing StumbleUpon’s web page collection is completely up to users like you. So keep recommending pages!

How can you recommend a page to StumbleUpon?

Want to become a StumbleUpon curator too? The power is in your hands! To get started, you must have either the Firefox Add-On or the Chrome Extension installed. (You can also recommend pages by going directly to the Submit Page, but it’s much easier to do it via the installed extensions.)

The screen where you can recommend a page to StumbleUpon.

Once you find a page you’d like to add to StumbleUpon, thumb it up from your Firefox/Chrome installed bar. (Tip: The Firefox bar is always present in your browser, while the Chrome bar needs to be “added” manually. Simply click on the StumbleUpon button in your Chrome menu bar to show the Chrome bar at the top of the page you’d like to add.) If the page is already in StumbleUpon, your thumb-up will become a green color. But if the page is new to our system, you will be taken to a submission form (as shown in the image above). Here, you’ll need to enter some information about the page (language it’s written in, whether it’s “safe for work” or not, the topic it falls under, etc.), which will help us categorize it and show it to the right people. Hit “Submit” and you’re done!

Useful tips:

1. Be both a consumer and contributor of stumbles, especially in a very niche topic. If you are passionate about a certain hobby, for example, submitting interesting pages about that topic helps improve the experience for other like-minded Stumblers.

2. Use tags. For every page you submit, you can add up to five tags. This will help you quickly find your favorite pages in your profile later down the road, as well as help other users find your content faster.

3. Don’t self-promote too much. Recommending too many pages from your own domain can be considered spam. StumbleUpon is a communal effort; it really does take a village to sustain it. Disproportionately recommending pages from a domain you own or with which you’re affiliated is frowned upon by other members of the StumbleUpon community, and can actually result in those pages being recommended by StumbleUpon even less frequently to other users. Instead, put abadge on your page so Stumblers who find those pages themselves can submit and share them. We like to think of StumbleUpon’s page selection process as a meritocracy where only the highest quality pages get in front of our users