I saw this auction for a StumbleUpon account come across my Web Auctions Daily feed yesterday and felt the need to comment.

The StumbleUpon account in question allegedly has 100,000 stumbles and 300 fans and is about a year and a half old. With an account like that you could quite easily drive massive amounts of traffic to any site you would stumble.

I’m not sure of the ethics of this kind of deal but, if that auction (now closed, and quite possibly bogus to begin with) is any indication, there seems to be quite a lot of interest in an account with those kinds of stats.

A Dangerous Weapon

I think I’ve made it clear in the past that I’m not really impressed with StumbleUpon traffic but having your very own power user account at SU would certainly be beneficial.

Everything you stumbled would turn into a traffic machine for at least a short amount of time. You could probably sell stumbles to the highest bidder with that much power. Maybe that’s why the seller on the auction had a “buy it now” of $10,000.

What Would You Do?

Now $10,000 for a user account at an otherwise free service is a bit extreme for most people. But here’s my question to you. If you had a chance to buy an existing StumbleUpon account (or Digg, Design Float, whatever) that had some leverage with the system would you do it?