You have probably tried the StumbleUpon service by now. It’s a Web 2.0 service that allows you to stumble upon interesting sites. It’s a very addictive service and extremely useful in finding good authority sites. But did you know that you can advertise on StumbleUpon? In essence, StumbleUpon allows you to take advantage of their pay per view system to get visitors to your site through their service.

Unlike Google Adwords, StumbleUpon allows you to pay per visit and not per click per se. So your site will load and the visitor will have a glimpse before you are charged the whole $0.05 for it. Not only that, StumbleUpon doesn’t work with keywords but categories. So the traffic is targeted but not by keyword.

The downside to StumbleUpon is that the traffic is not highly convertible. The traffic that you get on StumbleUpon is more interested in doing research in surfing and less in buying. You can obviously optimize your landing pages to get higher conversions with StumbleUpon but the conversion will never reach the Adwords level.

So is the pay per view model here to stay? I think so. The PPV model is suitable for businesses that want to get eyeballs to their sites and not necessarily convert them. Besides there is no click fraud to deal with and the traffic can be cheap. I am sure at some point StumbleUpon will increase the cost per visit and make this system more complex but right now you would be out of your mind not to try StumbleUpon and their PPV model.