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The Giant Subscription Experiment = Fail

Experiments are awesome, they can teach you loads of new things and sometimes astound you with the results. A couple of days ago, I conducted my first experiment that asked Stumblers to give my article a thumbs up and subscribe to my feed, just on keep reading to find out what happened ;) scientist

By the way, since I’ll be doing many more experiments, a certain layout will be used to organize the results.

The Purpose
The purpose of The Giant Subscription Experiment was too see whether or not StumbleUpon users would do something merely because they were asked to. Their were no incentives for doing it and nothing was guaranteed if they did.

If you read the article, you can see that I was asking StumbleUpon users to subscribe to my feed and give my post a thumbs up (something that takes less than 30 seconds). The reason I asked them to give it a thumbs up was to make it more popular on StumbleUpon, thus, driving more traffic to it. As for the subscribing part, I wanted to see whether or not any Stumblers (who are known for spending less than a minute or so on a webpage) would bother subscribing to a blog they had never seen before just because they were asked to.

The Goal
I was aiming for was for the article to get thousands of unique visitors and for every single one of them to subscribe.

The Statistics
The article got about 120 unique views and I only got an increase of 20 subscribers. Although, I don’t know if the increase in subscribers was due to the experiment or an article published very recently on another blog featuring my blog. Nevertheless, the experiment post did not get the amount of views I was hoping for and neither was the increase of subscribers.

Failure Or Success?
All in all, this experiment was a total failure!

Why?
To be honest, I really didn’t think that this experiment was going to be a success even though my fantastic readers and friends helped me out by Stumbling it (whom I would like to thank very much). The reason is that people generally don’t just do something because you tell them to (unless it benefits in some way), especially if it involves a single ounce of work. But! Does it matter that this experiment was a complete failure? Not one bit! It’s called an experiment because you don’t know what to expect and do it to find out, so overall, I’m a happy person :)

I would like to thank everyone that helped me out by giving the article a thumbs up and subscribing! Many more experiments will be conducted in the days to come, so feel free to subscribe to my blog to stay updated :D

Do you have any ideas that you would like me to try out? Do you have anything that can help me improve my future experiments? Leave a comment below to let me know, thanks!

Photo by practicalowl

Written by Rajaie AlKorani
July 31st, 2008

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13 Responses to “The Giant Subscription Experiment = Fail”

  1. Hi Rajaie

    I just wanted to let you know I enjoyed reading this – and I am going to subscribe right now! – and not because you asked me too! :-D

  2. by Rajaie AlKorani at 4:08 am on 31/07/08

    @Robin, I’m glad you subscribe, and even more glad that you did it by your own will :)

  3. Hi Rajaie,

    I’m looking forward to your future experiments. Thank you for the link!

    P.S. I subscribed over a month ago. :)

  4. Just try submitting more and more to social sites…I have started submitting to 5-10 sites to gain some good ranking and this simple trick works for me ;-)

  5. by Rajaie AlKorani at 4:04 pm on 31/07/08

    @Barbara Swafford, don’t mention it :D

    @Rockstar Sid, or my users could submit them instead :P

  6. Honestly. To get actual traffic from SU you need to have an article that every likes. Our article 10 Things to Do With Your Old Computer got 10s of thousands of visitors. Its because a large number of people like it.

  7. by Rajaie AlKorani at 5:45 pm on 31/07/08

    @Adam, I am planning on writing a post a little offtopic from my usual posts, hopefully a success this time :D

  8. If its good I’ll SU it :P

  9. Damn I dind’t participate. I’ll stumble this page though :)

  10. by John Lee at 8:28 pm on 01/08/08

    I use Stumble to look for new interesting sites. This is how I got here. To be honest, if someone tried to tell me what to do when I landed on a site then I would not do it, reward or no reward.
    I have told many of my friends about Stumble and they all use it the same way as I do. It is rare that I give a thumbs up to a site unless it is really exceptional. I regularly give thumbs down though. Probably 95% of sites get no response from me. I think the problem with Stumble is that a huge proportion of the users just use it for finding new and interesting sites. Then there is the rest who use it for business/promotional purposes. It is from the later group that you can hope to get your thumbs up whereas the rest possible do not understand its purpose or see no point in it.

  11. Btw Rajaie, it failed because 1) I wasn’t doing it 2) need better RSS buttons! Huhuh just kidding I guess. Sorry to hear it was a failure, I was hoping to do this.

  12. Hey too bad.Its disappointing to hear.

  13. Hehe I’m doing something like this for this week.

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