John Cow thinks so with his latest post in why he is leaving Entrecard. His post has sparked a lot of controversy and at the time of this writing spawned several additional posts around the blogshpere with people defending his stance or defending Entrecard. I’m going to take neither side in this blog post.

John makes some valid points. I’ve looked at my traffic from Entrecard and I have similar results as what John is showing in terms of bounce rates, time on site, etc.. So only taking those items into account, it would seem that Entrecard is not really the best system, but there is more to it than just drops. Now while my bounce rate is fairly high, I have seen some other benefits. my subscriber count has increased as well as my Technorati ranking has increased. I can only assume that my subscribers increased because of Entrecard as I’m not aware of any way to tie new subscribers to how they actually found their way onto my site, but I can say the increase in Technorati ranking is a direct result of Entrecard. I’ve gained quite a few links from blogs that would not have linked to me if it had not been for Entrecard. These bloggers found this site as a result of Entrecard and as a result they linked to one of my posts. I’ve done the same of other bloggers as a result of a post I found on their blog while dropping a card.

Now John says that the people who are more active in the system gain the highest ad price, even though Graham says its not related to how many cards you drop. Ad price of blogs are determined by the number of times someone drops a card on your site per day multiplied by 2 and averaged over the last 5 days. This is my understanding of the system and the way ad price is calculated. The number of cards you drop is not considered in the calculation of your advertising price. But while there may not be a direct factor in this calculation there is some correlation between the number of card drops you drop and the number of drops you receive. Why this correlation exists is not totally clear, but it has to do with the inbox. Entrecard users tend to drop on the people who last dropped on them so a lot of people drop on the people in their inbox first. I personally don’t think this is the best strategy. The other strategy that a lot of people use is to just open up a particular category and start dropping on everyone in the category starting with who ever is at the top, which means the prices at the top always seem to grow more than the blogs lower in the category. Is this because people get tried of dropping and never make it to the bottom. I don’t know what others do, but this is how I drop cards and I very rarely make it all the way to the bottom of a particular category  unless its is very small.

I used to spend a good amount of time building up credits, but I only spend a few minutes a day now and I mostly just drop on sites which I’ve started reading as a result in my involvement in Entrecard. I would have never ran across these sites if it would not have been for Entrecard and if there where no other benefits from me having this little card in the sidebar than just me finding these sites, then the space is well utilized.

I’ve posted about Entrecard several times and every time I based the value in Entrecard in the community not the clicks. Entrecard may not be all that useful for blogs such as John Cow, or John Chow and Problogger( Darren has already said he gets paid and I’m sure John Chow does too), but for smaller blogs is a great system, not for the traffic, but for the networking possibilities it provides. Who knows these baby blogs of today may be the huge blogs of tomorrow. I’ve found several blogs on Entrecard that I fully expect to grow into huge blogs in the future and I’m getting links on those blogs. I for one am going to stick around Entrecard for a while and see where things go.