Advertising Is Not Free—It’s Too Expensive & Other Paradox In Entrecard Town
Posted by
eli
on 10/04/09• Categorized as Consulting
I told my favorite blogpal Lainybelle of Lainy’s Musings that I will not talk anymore about Entrecard, I will no longer discuss Entrecard, I will not blog again concerning Entrecard, I will forget Entrecard.
But I cannot keep my mouth shut about Entrecard. Why? Because Entrecard keeps on haunting me like a sad refrain of a beautiful melody, and its many paradox keep ringing on my ears and make my day.
What is a paradox? It is a statement, proposition, or situation that seems to be absurd or contradictory, but in fact is or may be true.
The EntreTown is full of paradox, some of the interesting ones are as follows:
1. Advertising is Free in Entrecard but it is probably the most expensive advertising network in the blogosphere.
To advertise, a user or member must earn entrecredit (ec) by dropping cards, one drop, one ec.
To drop a maximum of 300 cards a day, you have to spend at least 30 seconds per blog/card. So, to drop 300 cards you spend 2.5 hours daily.
How much is your time worth? If your time is worth $ 10/per hour, then your dropping 300 cards a day is worth $ 25. That’s $ 25 for 300 ec.
But note that the Top 30 popular blogs in EntreTown, those sites that can possibly give you maximum exposure for your 24-hour ad because they are getting 300 plus visitors daily, are worth at least 1024 ec to advertise. In that case, we have another paradox: You have to drop 300 cards for 3.4 days just to advertise for 1 day in 1 blog.
2. If you do not want sponsor ads to run on your EC widget starting October 5, 2009, you can opt out of sponsor ads and pay Entrecard $50/ year. This is to enjoy the free services of Entrecard for years to come.
3. To become a member is free in Entrecard but it imposes a 75% tax from all members for running an advert. This is the highest tax rate in the world.
4. In EntreTown, a member is free to write and post comments in the EC blog, but if your comment is unsupportive of management’s wishes, it still “awaiting moderation” for days and can’t see the light of day.
5. In EntreTown, once the Admin suspect that “there are a small group of users who are extremely angry and are using the EC blog comments to encourage other members to rebel against Entrecard,” they would always decide to disable comments. The good old days of censorship are back! – exclaimed Caledonian Comment in the EC Forum.
Because of this post, a few members will react again, and would tell me that if I don’t like Entrecard, then I have “to remove the EC widget from my blog or cancel my account.”
But that, again, is a paradox. If many users cancel their accounts, Entrecard will just die a sudden natural death as a blogging community as a result, since it has no more members to speak of.
Me, I did not cancel my account yet because I thought Entrecard is paying $ 50/year for users like me who are not accepting sponsor ads.
Brilliant post. I heard from friends that you are a very good lawyer, but not only that, you can be a good satirist also. I can almost die laughing.
Oh, wow! ^^ I think you’re one of the pioneers of Entrecard. I am not that active in Entrecard that’s why I don’t really grasp the difference between now and before. ^^
@ fedhz, i’m not one of the pioneers of Entrecard. I joined last week of June of this year only, so am a member for more than 3 months now.
Eli,
You’ve hit the nail completely on the head.
Pretty soon, they’ll be asking for a monthly fee, my friend.
You heard it from me first.
On another note,
Thank you for your very kind words in Blogging Circle’s blog comments
a day or two ago, even tho the post was in jest. Nevertheless, I truly
appreciate the kudos.
Sincerely,
Mike
EC is fun to talk about isn’t it? I think it’s the total lack of professionalism from them that makes it so.
Once again I’m going to, well, not quite disagree with you.
Firstly:
I agree about the 75% tax, though I understand why they do it.
And I agree about the cost of advertising using ECs, and I think this is totally valid if a person *buys* ECs to spend on advertising. Though why anyone would do that is beyond me, as your equations are totally correct in that regard.
Thus for the following argument I will discount those ECs.
As mentioned, I agree with your sums, but you are leaving out another side to EC points. And that is that by dropping them you are essentially participating in a ‘Click Exchange’ scheme. You are investing your time in two ways. One to get return visits, and two to accumulate points.
Thus you could consider the credits as a *side effect* of the whole EC shebang.
Whatever you think, you should factor into the equation the return drops (visits) to your site by fellow Entrecarders. I’d say that would divide the ‘loss’ in half, at least, depending upon return drop numbers and other how you calculate the worth of visitor numbers.
There’s probably an equation you could do, but then arithmetic has never been my strong point! lol
I’m fully behind the ‘blog comments’ thing you mention as well. Their PR work is laughable!
Keep ‘em coming.
…and what else are you going to do with the credits?
@ Chinaren, every time you comment on my post, I always feel honored and elated.
I really enjoy your sharp, frank, intelligent and witty comments. If all bloggers have only a razor-sharp intelligence and wit as you have, the blogosphere would be a warm, wonderful, and enjoyable place. All discussions would be dispassionate and vibrant. Sadly, it is not and people like you are few and far between.
I have no reserve credits, since every time I earned it from drops and running an advert, I used it to purchase ads also. I could not think of any other uses for it anyway, except for blog advertising.
Hi Eli,
Personally I am here by clicking through Adgitize and I love it. I feel a great weight lifted now that I canceled my account with Entrecard.
When you speak of the time for dropping you left out one factor. That would be those of us in rural areas dependent upon a mush slower satellite connection. For me to even get 200 drops a day would take double the 2.5 hours.
Now, I do not know how this will effect my traffic yet as we also had a death in the family and my posts this weekend have been dedicated to documenting that. also, due to this fact, I have not had time to do any blog hopping at all.
However, I had 300+ visitors a day way before EC and I just imagine with a little hard work, learning to use my other advertising systems, such as today, stop, read and contribute, that eventually I will be able to rebuild.
In my opinion, at least for my blog, Entrecard, in the end, has become a negative for my blog. EC’S system demands so much time that I have neglected other forums and friend’s blogs that were not with EC.
I hope you have a great week! BTW, I am going one further than you. I am not only not going to write about Entrecard anymore I shall also make this my last comment on a post related to Entrecard.
They are getting a ton more free advertising now as almost every other blog with them is writing about them at some point and time. I think it is some twisted form of business thinking on their part, whereby, even bad publicity is still publicity.
Jackie
I read it, Starting to make sense. I am moving on, Will not let their Heart Monitor effect me too much….. Hope their Shocks back to life won’t be too many, as it can lead to a weak Heart and It might not survive the next attempt. I will stay til the end of their life.. but not mourn if the Die….for we must move on to stay alive ourselves.LOL Seriously we are giving them too much time and really need to not feed into this subject. It makes them sound too interesting and gives them way too much PR. I posted one Article on my site just to make the point that their statements in the Terms and conditions (MOP)have not changed from the start, and this miss leads the user/joiner expectation. I brought this up to the administration with no response.
I never knew about this $50 a year payment starting Oct. 9, but then if it takes effect , I won’t pay them a single cent, and if they cancel my account, so be it.
I totally agree with all the points you raised. I am spending too much time dropping just to get points/credits to advertise, yet I discovered, the same thing as you did, that it’s not worth it anymore.
I’d been a member of Entrecard for 1 year now, but I’m getting frustrated about their system again and again and again. To top that , their Support is worse—-in my experience, they responded to my query so rudely and arrogantly.
And they completely misunderstood what I have wrote about my problem in Entrecard, to which they “bitchily” responded. That was just recent.
I would have gotten out of this Entrecard bull-s–t , but I was hesitating since it gives me traffic too, but then if this is the case, when I have to pay $50 ayear to opt out for sponsored ads, then I will definitely be out of it.
Another great post. I mentioned it in my blog post, Post EntreCard Blog Promotion, http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3768 though my post is more aimed at looking at comparable services for people that are thinking about leaving.
There’s a $50 payment? Hmm that just shows I haven’t done anything with Entrecard for months already. Their widget is up in my blog but that’s it.
I agree with your numbers and I stopped dropping cards a long time ago. I just didn’t think it was worth it and for that amount of time I could just as easily write quality posts, read and comment on good blogs which I think would also drive quality traffic to my site better than Entrecard.
I usually drop cards between doing other things. It reminds me to check out my favorites sites, but I don’t care too much about the actual credits and such…
If I’m already essentially wasting time by surfing around dropping and buying ad space on friends sites, I don’t have any more time to waste worrying about it.
BTW – Thanks for being one of my top droppers in September!
I will see how things turn out and most likely spend less and less time with greedy overbearing Entrecard. At 100 clicks a day I get an incredible amount of free exposure from Adgitize.com – whenever I receive funds for advertising from others at CMFads I place more ads. Between the two alternatives I think you can generate as much if not more traffic that will actually read your blog compared to the flitting glimpses of EC users. I could see the end coming as soon as paid ads were introduced way back when, oh well end of an era.
This is a great post. Great blog too by the way
I have only been with entrecard for a few weeks. I tend to spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly around “the net” as is so dropping doesn’t bother me too much. What struck me with this post and the comments is how much it reminds me of ebay. Ebay is another site that has the “my way or the highway” attitude. It doesn’t matter how much money you pull in for them they still feel that they can treat you however they see fit. Of course this infuriates users and I see many posts and comments just like the above on ebay related sites. What happened to the World Wide Web? It wasn’t always like this. You could comment on anything and no one thought to remove it. Maybe they didn’t know how to back in the day. Who knows? 
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