Statcounter, an analytical service, has just announced that StumbleUpon has surpassed Facebook in terms of driving social media traffic, accounting for 43.34% of the market. This may be hard to believe given the user base for each site with StumbleUpon at 12 million and Facebook at 600 million users. Below is a graph constructed by Statcounter:

The graph shows StumbleUpon beating out Facebook in March, but the steady climb to beat out Facebook at the years end indicates a more permanent place for StumbleUpon at the top of the market. Most people would expect the numbers to be more like they were in August with Facebook driving about twice as much traffic, given their tremendous amont of users, but is it that surprising that StumbleUpon drives more social media traffic> The next web stated that:

Stumbleupon is well known for its ability to drive huge numbers of visitors to websites that have been “Stumbled”, sending users to different websites that have been marked with with a “Thumbs Up” by other users (over 12 million of them in fact), in effect vouching for the target website and deeming it legitimate and a decent source of information.

Read the rest of the article at TNW

StumbleUpon is unique in that it is designed to allow users to "discover the web" and naturally sends people to different sites, while mostly everything else is designed to keep users on their site. To me the fact that StumbleUpon beat out Facebook is not surprising at all. What is surprising, though, is that up until the end of the year Facebook was beating StumbleUpon, given the way each site is used. Although StumbleUpon is "bigger" than Facebook, I doubt that it has much traffic to its own site, which is exactly how it was designed.

Picture from Statcounter