From a normal bloggers point of view I hope that entrecard can fix its problems soon. If not I hope some new company come out with a betetr system and give entrecard a kick up the ass.

Thanks for the read

I believe that the point about tying value to action is very true, and an important strength of the idea. However, I also believe that the type of action being given value is not a good long term one.

When it boils down to it, you are mainly attracting other bloggers (hopefully from similar niches to your own). It’s an interesting twist on the classic manual traffic exchange systems of old. It seems to yield similar results, in that a lot of the traffic doesn’t stick around once the card is dropped, but a small percentage might interact (which is a good thing).

But, what the system cannot do, is tie value to the core action of (worthwhile) bloggers – writing! I say this because that is surely the true value a blog has to offer, and so it logically follows that the action should be tied into that value, does it not?

I can’t see an easy way round that problem, given the current banner exchange model.

Right now, it looks to be (as the original article suggests) a good tool for the smaller blogger to get a wave of traffic coming in, where hopefully a few people will stick around. It will vary from blog to blog of course, but since it won’t really engage non-bloggers too often, the value it will give will always be limited.

I don’t want to sound as though I’m totally knocking the system. I’m not, since it is a nice innovation. But whether it will have the staying power of a MyBlogLog, I don’t know. Without the continued support of more prominent blogs, the system could be prone to a lack of interest (only speculation of course).

I’ve enjoyed stumbling across articles on EC though, since it has been a good source of varied opinion.

I won’t make any predictions aloud since there’s no basis for anyone to believe me either way but I will say that some things are best to get in, work hard, and get out. If you’re there at the critical point when the fascination is building, you can score quite a benefit.

Personally, I’d love to give insight to the developers of such things but they are usually too guarded to tell me what I need to know to give them some exceptional guidance. I spent 30+ yrs in my family’s business where 1 division alone sold for $10M so I do have some “insider” wisdom.

But, in any case, enjoy it while it lasts! Let’s hope someone big picks it up rather than, as you said, a competitor seizing the opportunity to do it better.

Sam
ps. my link above goes directly to all my entrecard articles. You’ll see what I’m getting at there…

I understand that credits are removed during the advertising process, but there are still a lot created. I personally do not drop the number of cards to reach the limit every day, but I think a lot of people do drop the maximum on a daily basis. I’ve only dropped the max credits a couple of days. Most days I may drop only 20-30 cards. Even with this I’ve been able to amass over 2000 credits while still purchasing ad spaces to keep my blog out there in front of eyeballs.

Don’t get me wrong I love this system as it has brought me a lot of traffic I would not have otherwise had and I have a couple of new sites coming online and part of their advertising strategy involves utilizing Entrecard to get the traffic started. I’m sure everything will work out great as you guys keep tweaking the system.

Something needs to be done with users submitting some many ads per day. I think it should be limited to a certain number.

Entrecard has also said they are going to be giving us more things to do with our credits, who knows what exactly that will be or when it will happen. EC has also been having some server issues recently, hopefully this will be solved once they monetize their site and buy another server.

Entrecard has been a success so far, but they need to keep people hooked in order to stay great.

Inflation: You mentioned that the biggest problem is inflation because credits are never taken out of the system. This is actually quite wrong. As you know, the only thing you can spend credits on are advertisements, and every time you spend credits on advertisements 75% of those credits are deleted from the system, and only 25% are passed on to the the publisher. Thus, our accumulation rate is only 25%, and as we roll out new bells and whistles and upgrades that you can purchase for credits, the accumulation rate will drop even lower.

Bogus websites to farm credits: These would get deleted from the system within about 24 hours. We have a feature that allows people to flag sites as being low quality, and we simply delete these sites after sending the owner an email. We delete affiliate stores as well as low quality blogs on a regular basis. It would be a lot of work to set up 20 widgets on 20 sites every day only to have them deleted, to do it all over again. Much easier to just visit other sites in the network and earn credits that way. The intended use literally becomes the easiest way to earn credits.

The 2 credit entry price: While a few people have been critical of the entry price for new sites, others have been very happy about it. This low price drives the traffic to new sites signing up. If new sites were expensive, people signing up wouldn’t receive that initial rush of traffic.

You mentioned that upon signing up, you get “bombarded with ad requests”. However, it is the case that people have an ad queue of only four adverts, so after four ads are requested, no more people can apply to advertise some of those are either rejected or accepted. If you don’t do that for a day or so, you will never have more than four advertisers waiting for approval to get on your site.

We’ve been listening carefully to everyones feedback, as well as doing some good hard thinking ourselves. We have an incredibly talented and intelligent team behind this, we’re constantly working behind the scenes. We tweek the system regularly to shape it into something that is really going to work long term.

Great things are in store for Entrecard, including a major announcement before X-mas.