I’ve been using StumbleUpon (for advertising) since roughly May/June of 2005. I’m very happy with the quality of traffic coming in, and it is also nice seeing feedback from end users.

At the same time, the system is a bit convoluted. It isn’t easy picking one category out of a hundred (figuratively), and so my monthly spending is likely around $20-$40 (when I am willing to spend much more).

So I was actually glad when about a week ago a Ms. Brooke from StumbleUpon emailed me yesterday. She said that she sees that SU users like our websites (we have a roughly 70-80% approval rating), and that she has extra SU categories to suggest that would be a good fit.

That made me happy. I was willing to give them more money, but I had no desire to go through their crummy interface. So after a bit of email back-and-forth, I basically said I was willing to spend $500 a month on SU advertising and we can go from there.

I didn’t hear anything for a few days, and then I got a nice little generic message from their VP of Marketing. He let me know that Ms. Brooke was no longer with SU, thanks for your business, and continue to use the self-advertising system.

I was absolutely confused. Here was a chance to increase your revenue from a single advertiser from a paltry $150 a year to $6000 a year (or even more, $500/month was just a testing amount). The effort on their part was minimal. And its not like they didn’t read our email correspondence - it was a straight reply from my last email.

Stuff like this just makes my shake my head.

UPDATE 15 minutes later: I had emailed back conveying my confusion. I got a nice little one line reply again telling me to just do it myself.