Report: StumbleUpon’s Traffic Down 53% Since July

New data from social plugin provider Shareaholic released today is showing a continued decline in traffic sent to publishers’ websites from StumbleUpon. According to traffic trends on its network, StumbleUpon’s traffic has declined by 53% since July and Twitter now outpaces StumbleUpon’s share of traffic by a slight 0.22%.

StumbleUpon notably unveiled a major Pinterest-like redesign in September, after a previous redesign introducing “Channels” fell flat. Traffic dropped noticeably, down 24% by June from the previous year (source: comScore). Notably StumbleUpon’s co-founder Garrett Camp stepped down as CEO this May, prior to the company’s announcement that it would discontinue the “Channels” beta the following month.

The fact that StumbleUpon has now adopted the Pinterest user interface isn’t promising, either. Shareaholic, however, says it’s too soon to really see if this latest revamp will pay off in click-throughs and traffic to publishers’ sites. In addition, Shareaholic notes that when readers do visit StumbleUpon, everything is wrapped in an iFrame, so even though readers may be clicking through to read the site, pageviews may not be recorded as referral traffic. In addition, some readers, after first discovering a new website via StumbleUpon may decide to later return on their own, in which case it would be hard to see their clicks as first being inspired by a visit to StumbleUpon.

Meanwhile, in terms of driving traffic to sites, Pinterest continues to top Yahoo! organic traffic – something it first began to do in August. It’s also the fourth largest traffic driver to sites worldwide, following Google (organic), direct and Facebook, in that order. Shareaholic also saw Google’s organic traffic decline 48.88% six months ago in April to now, where it currently owns 37.86% of the traffic. Of course, Google organic traffic still leads by far over other traffic sources.

Shareaholic’s data, while only representative of the Internet as a whole, comes from a large sample. The service now includes 200,000 publishers who reach 300 million people per month.

Update, 11/8/12 – StumbleUpon provided the following statement: “We do not agree with the data. Our internal data shows that since July the number of Stumbles and referral traffic have increased over that timeframe. We have connected with Shareaholic to better understand their methodology. Moving forward, we believe our redesigned web site and mobile apps will continue to deliver the best content discovery experience on the Web for our community and our partners.”