StumbleUpon Tops Facebook As Social Media Traffic Source

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StumbleUpon became the top source of social media traffic in the United States, wresting the position from Facebook during the lead-up to the new decade.

The social discovery network accounted for 43.34% of social media traffic in December, compared with 36% in November, according to StatCounter. Facebook, meanwhile, had 38% share in December vs. 44.35% in November, the research found. YouTube was responsible for about 7% and Twitter had about 5% of the market, StatCounter said. StatCounter measures the share of traffic sent from Facebook, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, MySpace, and Digg.

Internationally, however, Facebook continued to dominate: The social networking giant represented about 60% of social media traffic in December, compared with approximately 20% for StumbleUpon, according to StatCounter. StumbleUpon's numbers are on the uptick for January, while Facebook's international traffic figures for early January are trending downward, the research shows.

StumbleUpon has more than 13 million users, whereas Facebook has more than 500 million accountholders. In 2010, users "stumbled" about 6 billion times and submitted about 20 million new pages, said Katie Gray, communications manager at StumbleUpon, in a company blog.

"We made it possible to stumble sites and apps on mobile devices, including the iPad, iPhone, and Android phones; we revamped StumbleUpon Video, StumbleUpon Ads, and our Chrome extension; and we brought StumbleThru to thousands of new sites," she said. "We introduced a number of new features many of you have been requesting, like a more robust share panel and a 'show me more from...' stumbling option."