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.
Hopefully, the search engines will see EC as a friend. if they start penalizing, im so out.
Good points, personally I try to use Entrecard to discover new blogs as well that I may read, but I’m finding an awful number of them are pure moose poo poo doo. It also gives my site more exposure, and that’s never a bad thing either.
It’s still working for me, but I guess it all depends on what your goals are. Mine are to find interesting blogs to read and perhaps get some like minded people to read mine and place the occasional comment.
That wasn’t John’s goal (if that even is his real name…,) and it wasn’t meeting his needs so he went elsewhere. When it stops meeting mine, I’ll go elsewhere.
Why are people seeing this as the sky falling.
SB
While the “quality” of the traffic from Entrecard might be of concern for some people, it depends on how you look at it. In our case being a new blog it has helped raise the exposure we are getting at a price we can afford. Looking at our logs as well I would say we are getting a similar bounce rate from StumbleUpon users as we are from Entrecard users. I can see why the more established blogs don’t want the widget, but it can help jump start a new blog.
I’m relatively new to Entrecard…Just a couple of days and I have to say that this a great system for networking possibilities! Since I’ve subscribed to Entrecard I have seen a lot of good blogs (which I didn’t knew they existed!) and I’ve subscribed to them!
So, for me it’s a great system! Ow yeah.. at the time I signed on Entrecard I had no subscribers, but now I got 4! It’s not much, but you gotta start somewhere!
I’ve learned a lot from other bloggers on Entrecard. I’ve met quite a few people as well and made some new friends. You get back what you put in.
@evilwoobie: Search engines won’t ever penalize EC users. The EC widget is Javascript and search engines ignore it.
thanks for the link btw.
I’m a late comer as I just joined today. It took me a bit to decide if I wanted to add yet another thing to my blog…
I like your points and I do plan on giving it a little bit of time to decide if I’m in or out. I’ll have to hop over and check out John Cow’s post about Entrecard as well.
Good write up, fellow Entrecarder.
for smaller blogs is a great system, not for the traffic, but for the networking possibilities it provides.
Quoted for truth.
I have came across several interesting sites via Entrecard.
Glad to know that Search Engines would not penalize Entrecarders.
Cheers!
We’re hardly dying a slow and painful death. Every day that goes by we do more pageviews, sign up more members, and get more visits than ever before. Just look at our Alexa chart:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/projectwonderful.com?site0=mybloglog.com&site1=entrecard.com&y=p&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=3m&size=Medium
We now consistently do more pageviews than mybloglog.com. A blogger like John Cow can say what he wants, but my bet is that he’s trying to build a competing system and rip off my idea again, the same way he ripped off my Million Dollar Wiki website with his ever-creative Million Euro Wiki website.
Yeah… the community thing is why I’m still there. As a new blog EC has helped my Alexa count, gotten new eyeballs to the site and have found sites I probably would not have found otherwise. The recent “doom & gloom” is to be expected, some look at the dropping as work and people love to put that down.
@Graham, I don’t need to look at the numbers, I know its alive and well, I just wanted to cover both sides of the equation here. Interesting about Million Euro Wiki idea. I was not aware of who did that.
I actually like Entrecard and I really like what it has done to help this blog grow. I do get a little concerned about the people in the forums that think its worthless traffic. Some people will actually listen to them and it may start to cause some community issues down the road. I doubt these people will really become the majority becuase a lot of Entrecard members have done there homework and understand traffic is traffic. Entrecard is really no different than StumbleUpon in terms of the visitors are flying by. Yoo have to write interesting headlines to sloe them down a bit.
In the sense that it generates traffic EntreCard works, no doubt there (at least initially). As far as being of value in terms of users and bloggers alike, I’m very skeptical.
Personally I’m a bigger fan of content linking. It brings better users increasing CTR as well as traffic. Remember 1% increase in CTR is worth hundreds of users. Link your blog with similar pages (the core of Arkayne) and you’ll get better page rank and CTR. Just so your readers have a context (alternative to EntreCard) of what I’m referring to:
For The Curious: Arkayne.com
Deimos Tel`Arin: Don’t worry, we’re not making anything like entrecard. We just dropped it, that’s all. No need to start insinuating things.
Besides, wasn’t the MillionDollarWiki Graham’s idea? When he just started it, we contacted him to see if we could buy the code, to which he agreed. In the end we were waiting too long and we had it coded by someone else. So is that really a “rip-off”? Wikipedia has been around a long time, but that’s probably a totally different ballgame eh?
Anyway, we have nothing against Entrecard, it just isn’t for us. That’s all.
Interesting post… I do not think Entrecard is dying as of yet and doubt it would die in the near future. But I agree that the traffic is not the best. My blog is a small blog, so it benefited from the traffic from Entrecard. For large and established blogs Entrecard might not be as attractive as for small ones.
Thanks.