At Entrecard: What? An Ad Price Of 524,288 ec For 1-Day Ad Equals To 1,747 Days (4.78 Years) Of Dropping Cards!
Posted by
eli
on 9/15/09• Categorized as Consulting
I got the shock of my day today when I saw that the advertising price for a one-day ad on a blog Recuerdo Mi Amor is at 524,288 Entrecredits (ec).
At 524,288 ec, a member who wants to advertise on Recuerdo Mi Amor for just a 24 hour ad exposure has to drop a mamximum of 300 cards everyday for 1,747 days or for 4.78 years to earn that 524,288 Entrecredits.
1,747 days of dropping 300 maximum cards everyday for a 24 hour ad exposure?!
Yesterday, the ad price on Recuerdo Mi Amor was at 1,048,576 ec. This means a member who wants to advertise in that blog for a 24 hours ad exposure has to drop a maximum 300 cards everyday for 3,495 days or for 9.5 years!
Other members will react to this post, saying that I can choose to advertise in any member blogs, since there are countless blogs in Entrecard with ad prices of 2 ec, 4 ec, 8 ec, 16 ec, and so on.
But that is not my point here.
As a trained economist, I know that the blog advertising price in Entrecard is determined by the law of supply and demand — the more EC members who advertise on your blog, the higher is your ad price, and vice-versa, other factors remaining the same, e.g. popularity and the category of your blog.
But as an economist, I cannot for the life of me understand why an ad price for one blog will reach that 1,048,576 ec for a one day ad exposure last night, or 524,288 ec now, September 15, 2009.
Again, to emphasize: at the ad price of 524,288 ec, a member has to drop a maximum of 300 cards everyday for 1,747 days or 4.78 years for a one day ad exposure on the Recuerdo Mi Amor blog, at its current ad price.
This post has nothing to do with the blog Recuerdo Mi Amor, which is a nice and wonderful blog and its owner a consistent reciprocal dropper. This is not also meant to promote Recuerdo Mi Amor by way of free advertising in my high-traffic blog.
This has something to do with the inflation problem at Entrecard, which continues to plague the members and the community.
I vividly recall that when the Entrecard management decided to stop giving one Entrecredit to the person receiving a drop effective last September 1, 2009, the policy change was designed to solve the inflation problem.
As explained in the Entrecard blog, the change was to ensure a stable credit economy and reduce outstanding credit in the system, to make prices to advertise on blogs decline, making advertising more affordable.
But I have observed that the ad prices of the Top 30 most popular blogs in all categories, where my blog currently belong, have not decreased a bit since September 1, 2009.
And certainly, an ad price of 524,288 ec for a one day ad exposure is, for most EC members, not affordable.
Madre Mia, por Dios por Santo!
That’s one of the reasons why I left Entrecard! A kind of ridiculous pricing.
You’re an economist and yet you could not understand why the ad price is like that in Entrecard?
How much more the other members who just blog, blog, and blog, and react?
Good for you because you offer solutions and I’ve read in your previous posts that you proposed solutions to solve Entrecard problem of inflation. But did the Entrecard management listened to you and the other members who posted in the Forum and left comments on the EC blog”
I’m glad I was no longer a member of Entrecard. It was a peaceful, happy feeling.
Amber, but I want my blog to be anonymous.
I encountered this problem too. I was really shocked at the very expensive price. Whew! If bad things still continue to happen with entrecard, I’ll consider ditching it for sure.
I don’t think I would be patient enough to wait nine years to advertise on that blog unless I won an Entrecard lottery rofl. I am a few hundred short of advertising on your one lol.so I think I will wait a couple of days and do that instead.
Hi Eli!
I already had noticed this last week and was terribly shocked by the price! So I was planning to create a post about it but decided to send a message first to Recuerdo Mi Amor instead.
Here’s my original message to the author:
——–
hey friend!
I was greatly shocked to see your price- Wait: 30 days Price: 134217728 ec/day
Is this true????? Or perhaps a technical glitch in Entrecard system????? Oh my! I do not have enough ECs to advertise in yours if this is the case.
———
Here’s the response I got from the author:
——–
Yes it’s true…Now it’s goes down a little bit..
——-
This is a major problem with how the Entrecard system works. Tsk!
Hi Eli,
yup and i thought i can’t make such a post again because the last post about The Journey http://vielerfolg.com was already a high price with over 250.000 EC in early August.
Last week i discovered the ad price of this blog, too and asked the owner if this is the correct price.
Who can have so many ECs?
Must be someone with a lot of blogs and perhaps one of these auto-clickers, we will see the solution in the last week of September. Then the advertisers will get their turn to show up on the widget
Mmmm. There must be something going on with this, as:
1. I can’t believe anyone would advertise that much for a blog. Hell, I wouldn’t advertise on GOOGLE for that much!
2. The Alexa traffic rank is only 145,000 (though the 7 day average is 75k) and it looks like it’s only been around about 3 months.
3. It doesn’t appear to be even ranked by Google or any other major engine.
4. Whilst not bad, as such, the blog is certainly nothing special.
5. The other two blogs by the same person are 2EC to advertise on.
I think it’s probably a glitch in the EC system, or the blog owner is spending money to buy ECs and advertising on her own site. (I think it’s a her).
…Looking at the blog further, I think it’s in violation of ECs TOS, as it seems to contain mostly sponsored blog entries.
This is absolutely crazy! I wouldn’t for my life, dare spend my hard-earned credits advertising for such a huge price. There must be something amiss here. It could be a system glitch.
The high price does not necessarily warrant such an expenditure for popularizing a Blog.
@Lainy:
I guess nobody would spent so many ECs in normal circumstances. It seems this person wants to get rid of them and let always one’s blog ad price rock in the sky. I’m curious if it’s the same blogs like in The Journey’s case from August
I think, it’s not that hard earned ECs from that person.
I read in twitter a few weeks ago that there is one person who has eight accounts and all of them use auto-clicking methods. If you calculate this it means 300 drops x 8 blogs (or more blogs in one account) = 2.400 EC + 2.400 EC for the drops on their blogs (talking from the past as we got 1 EC for this) + 100 – 500 EC for daily ad display. Let’s say in a sum: 5.000 EC/ day for all 8 blogs.
Would be within 1 year: 1.825.000 ECs
but in this case, they managed to get 64 million ECs (this was the highest paid price last week) + the previous paid ad prices. The amount spent on this blog was over 130 million ECs.
that is totally ridiculous!
in the next few years, i can advertise with that price..^^
I think there is a problem in the code. I can’t believe for a minute that there is one blog that is worth millions more than any other. Not to mention that it doesn’t even have a page rank.
Is there any people have so many of entrecard credit to buy one-day ads? I really interested in the previous advertiser who willing to use so much ec just to put one ads. For now, i just saw the maximum of 1000+ ec to put a ads on other blog. Even with that amount of ec (1000+), i still do not afford to buy one ads for that.
@Aftercancer – that should be a glitched after all.. hopefully. that is just a huge price…
I am so with you on this. There is no way that I would spend 4-9 years of solid card dropping to advertise on anyone’s blog for 24 hours. I don’t care how great the blog is. Thanks for your great blog! I enjoyed visiting!
I have a hard time getting up to 300 credits how does one get to that point.. and I wonder the the traffic really come to your blog with the ad?
Well, it is down to 262,144 EC today, but I think there is something fishy going on. Maybe she got together with a bunch of blog friends who had plenty of ECs and they decided to see just how high they could push a price. It would be easy enough to do and an interesting experiment, eh? Certainly not the norm. The next one down the list is at 4096.
I cannot help but wonder if that ad prices was gamed. I suspect there are ways of falsely inflating the price of advertisements. Probably having to do with placing ads that never get run or approved. Either that, or there is a bug in EntreCard which would not surprise me.
It is worth noting that you can by EntreCard credits on the open market. At $125 for 25000 credits, that would make the ad cost $2500/day. That seems a bit steep.
I think EntreCard has not seriously thought about how to deal with the economy. They do not provide the number of credits in circulation, sort of like the M1 money supply in the U.S. economy. That would be useful information.
Their efforts to cut inflation, by cutting the number of credits produced when a card is dropped doesn’t really address the problem. I end up receiving three or four hundred less credits a day, and so I spend three or four hundred credits a day on advertising. The net effect to the credit supply is flat. The only result is less ads. That may drive down advertising costs, at least where I’m not buying ads. However, you would think that they would want to encourage people to advertise, not discourage it.
Looking at the statistics, you’re right, the high end sites have not come down in price. Right now, an ad on my site costs 1500 credits, or about $9 if you buy those credits. It has remained pretty constant. The advertisers that are getting hurt are the low to middle priced advertisers. I like to look at the ratio of popularity to price to gauge relative value of an add. Prior to the change, the popularity to price ratio had been averaging between 4 and 5 for sites costing under 128 credits. It has now climbed to 8 to 10. So, the changes have hurt prices, but on the low end and not the upper end.
Enough thoughts for now.
Lets face facts and that is Entrecard is only slighlty better than worthless. The quality of the traffic we get from it is as low as it can get.