If you are an Entrecard user you probably might have noticed minor changes over the past few weeks with the interface and a few other major changes as well which also brought temporary unavailability of the website. As the change for how they calculated cost of an ad on a site changed I thought there was a temporary bug with the system as I watched my advertising cost go from 2048 credits to 1024 credits to 512 credits when I figured what was happening.
For those of you who don’t know about Entrecard, Entrecard is an innovative, new service used by thousands of bloggers including some of the A-list bloggers like Problogger and John Chow that provides free advertising on websites based on Entrecard ‘credits’ earned. See the Entrecard section on my sidebar? That 125*125 ad block is free advertising which was purchased via Entrecard credits. You can find out more about Entrecard by watching the video on their home page.
Getting back to the point, as you might have noticed, there were quite a few changes to the system including the major change of how much an ad costs for an advertiser. In the previous system, the cost of an ad was calculated based on the average of how many drops you received on your widget for the last 5 days multiplied by two. The amount of drops you receive on your widget can never be proportional to the amount of clicks that widget might get. It can vary considerably so calculating ad prices this way is not a very accurate method.
With the new system ads are calculated based on how many ads you already have in queue on your widget. The equation is like cost of an ad for a day on the widget = 2 [to the power] how many ads are in queue. So if there are 3 ads in queue, the cost would be 2*2*2 and so on. I think this new system of calculating cost is better than the old one. Increasing the cost based on the demand for that ad spot is a much more accurate method of calculating cost of advert as it gives a hint that the higher the demand, the more popular the site is which means there would generally be more clicks. You can read more about the new pricing system in this comprehensive post by CK marketing here
A few other changes are a cleaner interface in the directory and more advanced search features.
There are a few hiccups with the new system as well. The Entrecard users now get less promotion in their directory listing page as the list is divided into pages so unless you are on page 1 you would be getting less promotion, as before every Entrecard for that category was on the front page of that category.
The other thing is, the value for the credit has dropped now as the cost to advertise on a blog is much more than before but as far as I know they haven’t increased the amount of credits they give you for dropping on other Entrecards or receiving drops or for anything else, so I assume there’s going to be a lot of broke ‘Entrecarders’ out there now!
I am not the most active Entrecard user out there so I might have missed something somewhere so please leave your comments if I’ve got something wrong or missed something.
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Interesting, I didn’t know anything about their previous system..
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I really don’t like Entrecard, I tried them on a few of my blogs a few times but they never brought any quality traffic. I might have another go with the new method but I wont be holding my hopes up
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it does help to get a few extra visitors and also help get your Alexa down, its particularly useful if you are in your initial stages in terms of traffic as every extra visitor makes a difference.
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Is it traffic you really want though, in the past it was other webmasters clicking through not people who were interested in your sites. Yes it decreases your Alexa number, but I’m guessing that would only be useful if you were flipping your site.
You could get better targeted traffic from stumbleupon for the same effect.
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Stumbleupon is virtually the best way to get targetted traffic no doubt, ya i guess the traffic from Entrecard isnt of the highest quality but it is something.
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I’m still not too sure I like Entrecard. I didn’t see very high of a CTR when I bought some credits on a few different sites.
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yeah..i wouldnt depend on direct advertising on entrecard either, its kinda like a hit or miss,i suggest the only blogs you can guarantee traffic from is problogger n john chow,of course you’ll need 2048 credits stacked up for that,but the little bit a traffic (which i havent seen over the last few days) you get from your site listing is something…i guess now you wouldnt even get that bit of traffic from the listing as it is divided into different pages as i mentioned in my post..thanks for the reply..
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i just joined with entrecard, and until now my credit grow slowly, can u give me a tutorial how to growing entrecard credit ? thanks before
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I’ve been using EC for a while now and so far it’s been the only reliable source for traffic. The members have commented on my site and by using their campaigning feature I am able to find sites I am actually interested in. As a matter of fact it was an article on an EC members site that led me to a list where this blog was listed. Never would have found you otherwise.
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Now it is going worse !!
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They have introduced paid ads now and are getting even better.
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