Is StumbleUpon sort of like Pinterest? Yeah, yeah, I don't do social media and don't know about this stuff.
Doing a GIS, I found one of my pics, again presumably on a legitimate website, linked to on StumbleUpon, with, apparently "3939 views" since January this year.
As I've just found the site, I haven't found the takedown page or copyright statement yet ...
http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms
(Ironically, it's one of these photos that's used by a company, implying that the product in the photo is one of their own, so I guess these 3939 viewers will be disappointed.)

I get so sick of all those "social media" sites.

I can't keep up with that $h!t - who the heck is using all those things and who on earth has the time to participate everywhere?

And why do you have to register at stumbleupon if you just want to explore something?

What a drag.

I can answer that. Teens, and even kids 10-12 years old now. Housewives. Probably half of the workforce of the US. College students. Unemployed people. I think it's another mortgage crisis in the making. Sites making money off of nothing. No product. Everybody sharing everything and paying nothing. Stealing content and then making money off the advertising.

Sorry, rant over. 

Let's stop having kittens here. StumbleUpon doesn't host anything. It's basically a social bookmark sharing site - someone sees something, they like it, and it gets shown to other users with similar interests. And it's been around a long time - it's a great way to get your work shown to users with interests in photography.

"When you press the Stumble button, a message is sent to the StumbleUpon database that most likely is just your User ID. The database looks up the categories that you chose when you signed up. From there, the application most likely chooses one of those categories randomly. Then the application goes through that category and finds a webpage in that category that is new to you, and directs your browser to that page."

How is that different from pinterest?
While our work may be shown to users, without any way of linking to our personal or agency site (e.g. if linked from a buyer's site with no acknowlegement) how would people know it was our work (even if they cared) and how could that sort of use benefit us?

It's actually a little more like the old web rings, or at least that was my impression of it. I used to get decent Stumble traffic, but I'm not sure it is as popular now.

Also, I tend to agree with ppdd. This freaking out about every social networking or bookmarking site is a bit much. The internet is a big place and not everything is out to get you. Some of it is even helpful and good for promotion.

I'm not freaking out, I was just asking. I have no idea about social media.  I still can't see how it is helpful or good for promotion for our images to be posted there without any way of finding the original file. If people choose to promote themselves there, that's fine, but that's totally different.

Let's stop having kittens here. StumbleUpon doesn't host anything. It's basically a social bookmark sharing site - someone sees something, they like it, and it gets shown to other users with similar interests. And it's been around a long time - it's a great way to get your work shown to users with interests in photography.

"When you press the Stumble button, a message is sent to the StumbleUpon database that most likely is just your User ID. The database looks up the categories that you chose when you signed up. From there, the application most likely chooses one of those categories randomly. Then the application goes through that category and finds a webpage in that category that is new to you, and directs your browser to that page."

I agree, at a certain point we have to understand that a lot of the audience originally targeted by the Microstock industry is made up of bloggers, stay at home moms, crafters etc with small budgets that rely on things like social media to promote and grow their businesses. When they license our images - they are doing so to create an aesthetic that helps bring attention to their growing brand, therefore when social media sites like Stumble Upon and Pinterest take advantage of visual bookmarking to help bring traffic to these independent sites the people who originally licensed these images are doing nothing wrong. 

As an illustrator a lot of my clients that come through stock channels for custom work are from this same crowd that I've seen people here look down upon in the past few weeks with the whole Pinterest furor. In fact some of the blatant attacks are just needless.  Housewives start businesses too, and when they do in my experience they license images they've previously bookmarked on sites like this.  I think of it as an external lightbox.