The Twitter handle @breakingnews has approximately 3,379,339 Twitter followers. Today, it announced the launch of its very own StumbleUpon channel, a new feature available in the StumbleUpon redesign. This makes discovering @breakingnews content on StumbleUpon less serendipitous and more Twitter-like.
In its blog post, @breakingnews acknowledged that it was the only branded channel that curated stories from other sources. Other publications on StumbleUpon Channels, such as BuzzFeed, CNNMoney, ELLE and Seventeen, just to name a few, either aggregate content or produce original content. BreakingNews picks up on organizations that do break stories, sending more traffic back to them. The new StumbleUpon channel will give those publications an extra boost in traffic.
As of August, StumbleUpon was delivering half of U.S. social media traffic. If the @BreakingNews StumbleUpon channel grows – right now it only has 51 followers and 78 pages – sites that end up on it could see a decent uptake in traffic.
The MSNBC-owned @BreakingNews went international in November, expanding to a London-based UK team. Way back in 2009, when we first covered @BreakingNews, it was run by a 19-year-old named Michael van Poppel. It wasn’t long before BNO handed over management to MSNBC. It’s a good thing since MSNBCC’s own breaking news feed only had about 41,000 followers at the time, while @BreakingNews had 1.4 million. Today that number is at nearly 3.5 million, and that’s not counting the new StumbleUpon channel.
Is it essential for publications and Twitter feed aggregators like @BreakingNews to have a StumbleUpon channel? Let us know what you think in the comments.
