First of all, thanks to Dave from VirtualMarketingBlog.com for bringing the StumbleUpon Video topic up recently. Now let’s get to it…. StumbleUpon recently launched a video stumble service. Similar to how StumbleUpon offers random web pages to visitors using the stumble tool, SU Video allows visitors to stumble across random videos. Is getting a video into SU Video a worthwhile marketing effort, or just another “fad marketing” waste of time?

How it Works:

StumbleUpon Video is a video referral site. Unlike the toolbar used by StumbleUpon, SU Video is just a website served by StumbleUpon, with viral videos from various sources shown within. Videos are served from large video sharing sites. A visitor is supposed to rate videos with a thumbs up or thumbs down, so the service can “learn” their preferences. Marketing-wise, the hope would be that your video gets listed, and gets enough thumbs-up to drive decent traffic to it.

Fad or Fab?

FAD – Here’s why – If you simply want to visit StumbleUpon Video to look for something interesting to watch, go for it. It’s fine and dandy for what it’s supposed to be. But we’re here to talk about its marketing value, and frankly, it has very little. There are a few reasons for this:

1. It doesn’t appear that someone can actually submit specific videos to the service. If that’s the case, there are simply too many videos on the Web to just hope that yours will randomly get chosen. The fates are against you on that one.

2. The targeting is pretty lousy. It starts out in a general way, and is supposed to narrow down the interests of the viewer by their video ratings. Here’s the problem with that: if someone hates a video, or even just the title of the video doesn’t appeal to them, they’re enormously more likely to simply leave the page or stumble a new video rather than “voting” it down. Nice try, but wishful thinking on SU’s part….

3. It’s unlikely you’ll get direct traffic from it. You’d be much better off putting your viral video on your website, and simply adding the webpage it’s on to the regular SU index to drive both traffic and video views collectively.

4. The SU audience probably isn’t the best audience to market videos to in the first place. Let’s be honest now… SU users want instant gratification. They don’t want to be bothered to conduct searches… they want something already tailored to their interests, and just served up to them. They want what they want, and they want it NOW. If they don’t instantly see what they want, they click the convenient little “stumble” button and go somewhere else. It’s too easy not to. This simply isn’t the crowd that’s going to sit still long enough, in general, to watch video after video (or even one all the way through if you can’t immediately grab their attention…. not to mention potential streaming issues causing more viewer ADD).