My Dear Blog,

It has been a year since my last visit. Do you still know me? Do you still care about me? Because I sure hadn’t cared about you for a year at least. I barely even thought about you.

But here I am again not because I have run out of things to do but rather, I miss the things I used to do. Like blogging. I tried it out there, in the real world that has people with faces. It’s scary and they sap the energy out of you!

I think I’d rather be here with you, in the quietness of a blog unread. At least the spammer that occasionally visit, we can delete. And the rare visitor who leaves a genuine comment, we can answer back and not be expected to invite them for dinner.

I think I like it here, blog. It’s quiet here with you.

How about you? How have you been? Did you miss me? What is it like to sit fallow for a year? Were there any visitors at all while I was gone? Did you treat them well? Or did you just serve them up with the stale cookies I left in the cupboard?

Well I’m back now, so maybe we can spruce things up a bit and cook up something good. What do you think? Do you still feel like listening to me?

Most of the people I know, it seems, are also leaving Entrecard for one reason or another. There weren’t that many people who wanted the credits I had, so I’m giving them away to the four people who left a comment on my giveaway post and who are staying on with Entrecard. They are:

Makingmoney

Small Steps to Health

Nitesh Kothari

Potterchik

I hope the credits I sent to your accounts help you.

I have always hated waste of any kind and since I am now thinking of leaving Entrecard because of the New Paid Ads, I figured I will first giveaway my credits before quitting.

I can’t say that all my experience with Entrecard have been bad. Although I have never been an avid dropper, preferring to discover sites through the widgets rather than dropping and leaving like so many others who were trying to fulfill the 300 drops a day limit. I admit, I never got beyond thirty drops a day. That’s because when I visit blogs, I actually like to read what they are about and if there is something there that interests me, I may even leave a comment. I discovered many new blogs this way and some have become blogging friends or at the very least have become part of my blogrolls.

So thank you, Entrecard for the experience but now it’s time for me to move on.

ENTRECARD QUITTERS GIVEAWAY

Here’s my idea. I have 5 accounts on Entrecard with varying number of credits in them. Some have hundreds, others have thousands. I will send those credits to 5 people who:

1. Blog about the ENTRECARD QUITTERS GIVEAWAY and link back to this post
2. Tell me which of my blogs you’d like the credit from:
   Amoores
   Cooked from the Heart
   Found Not Lost
   Nette Life
   Test Star

Leave me a comment and the link to your post. You have until next Friday, April 17 to enter. On the 18th, I will draw 5 people from the comments and send you the credits. In the event that your choice of blog to get credit from is also chosen by another, I will average out the remaining credits on the blogs not chosen and send those to the winners.

Are you moving on too?

If you’ve decided to move on, what are you going to do with your Entrecard credits? Would you like to join me in a major Entrecard Quitters Giveaway? Hold your own Entrecard Quitter Giveaway if you are also quitting. You can design your giveaway anyway you want, you don’t have to follow my rules. For instance, if you want to raffle off increments of credits, that’s ok too.

Leave me a comment or linkback to this post and I will create a list of people who are holding Entrecard Quitters Giveaways and link back to your blog.

Are you staying on?

If you’re interested, there are also a couple of movements going on in the blogosphere namely Dropper Friendly and Old Skool Drop List. These are a select number of blogs in the Entrecard network who have vowed to not accept and New Paid Ads so the site you click on on their widget is a bonafide advertiser who paid in credits to the blog owner and not $$ to Entrecard. If you don’t want to click through paid ads, think about joining one of these groups or similar ones.

I will miss discovering new blogs through Entrecard. I wish all you who decided to stay, good luck!

I signed on to Entrecard yesterday and almost got excited as I saw the line of pending advertisements stretching all the way down the page. Normally I only get a few when I do my once a week check of the dashboard.

Then I noticed a new header on the ads. The lower half were under the heading:  NEW PAID ADS. My initial reaction was, “wow, we’re now getting paid for showing ads on our Entrcard widgets?” I had heard some talk in the past months of being able to get paid or cash our your Entrecard Credits, which is what you earn every time you drop your card on someone’s widget, when someone drops their card in yours and when someone chooses to advertise on your widget. In the past, all the thousands of credit that you amass in your account can only be used to buy advertisement on other blogs or you can transfer or give it to another user. People have been asking for a way to turn these credits into real money and it looks like it is happening right now, starting with these NEW PAID ADS.

Now before you get all excited about the money like I did, make sure you listen up and read the details first and don’t go flying off the handle when you find out that NO, YOU WON’T BE MAKING ANY MONEY DIRECTLY FROM RUNNING THESE NEW PAID ADS. My knee-jerk reaction to this was, “Heck no! How can someone announce they’re selling ads on my sites and I don’t even get a cut?” But before I started deleting all my Entrecard accounts, I decided to read up on this NEW PAID ADS thing first. Here’s what I found out from the Entrecard Blog:

1. PAY TO ADVERTISE - it used to be that you can advertise (have your Entrecard widget shown) on any blog in the network so long as you have EC (Entrecard Credits) to pay their asking price which, for the more established and popular blogs, could be so high that it would take you months to earn that enough credits to advertise for one day. Now you can pay real money to advertise. You can now purchase network-wide advertising for just $.02 (two cents) Cost-Per-Click or $.30 (thirty cents) CPM. Targetted by category, the prices double to $.04 CPC and $.60 CPM. Here is the Advertiser’s Terms and Conditions.
2. 75% ADVERTISING REVENUE TO USERS - now don’t get excited yet. You won’t get 75% of the amount of advertising on your blog. What Entrecard meant is that 75% of the revenue they earn overall will go into a collective pool that will be used to turn EC into real money.
3. CASHING OUT YOUR ENTRECARD CREDITS - the Credit Cashout Service is due to launch this Saturday, April 11. What it means is, you can now trade your EC for cash. The rate of exchange is not clear yet. According to the Entrecard blog:
   

   “The payment amount is going to fluctuate on a daily basis. We’re first going to try to clear all the credits from the system that people are willing to sell at very low rates. We have an internal supply and demand curve that will constantly adjust, so even though prices to sell credits will start out low, they will go up over time as more credits are removed from the system. But we will be starting at the bottom.”

4. WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU AND YOUR BLOG - You will continue to earn EC for generic ads placed on your blog. However, for the New Paid Ads, you won’t earn any credits. Your generic ads and the New Paid Ads will run 50% of the time each on your blog. According to the Entrecard blog, ”
   

   The ads purchased with EC will display 50% of the time, for as long as you have paid ads running through your blog. Nothing has changed for credit-bought ads and the credit-ad system, except that they will only display half the time if enough paid ads are running through the blog.

   I took this to mean that one day, you’ll have a generic ad running then the next day will be a paid ad, and so on. That’s how it’s worked in the past. When you buy an ad on a blog, your card stays on that blog all day for 24 hours. But today when I looked at a blog that had an Entrecard widget on it, I saw one ad when I first got there and when I switched to another page on the same blog, I noticed that the ads changed when the page refreshed! I haven’t approved any paid ads on this blog yet but if you’d like to see what I mean, go to my main domain and refresh a couple of times. You’ll see what I mean. I don’t see how that could be fair for the ads that paid EC credits to place their card on your widget. If you are paying to advertise though, this may work more in your favor. After all, when you pay for an ad, there is a good chance that your card will be shown on the more popular blogs that you would have never afforded to advertise in using just your EC.

I am not sure yet whether I like this new system or not so I am testing it on a couple of my blogs for now. I have a feeling though that with this new system, the free EC system of old will soon fade away as everyone either leaves Entrecard altogether or switch to the dollar system.

I have never been an avid Entrecard dropper, I only check my accounts once a week and only drop on accounts as I come across them during my usual bloghopping. I have to admit though that on the days that I do a number of card drops, visits to my blog increase. As it also does when I buy advertisement on another blog. I think if they go to an all paid system, they should also compensate the blogs that they show their advertisers in directly. That way it is clear to everyone and no one feels like they are being taken advantage of.

A lot of bloggers out there are taking differing views on this issue. Here’s some you may want to look at:
Outlandish Observation on Entrecard’s New Paid Ads System
Martinact asked, WTF, Entrecard?
A Sickening Sense of Entitlement is how Confoozled labeled the negativity surrounding this issue.

NOT COOL AT ALL!!!OK, so I thought I was done with this issue and was ready to calmly go on and have the fates of blogging fall where they may. I talked in my post above above experimenting with this new paid ads system on a couple of blogs. On this blog, I DID NOT APPROVE ANY NEW PAID BLOGS. But guess what, when you refresh this page, the ads now cycle and the ads are all ads that are on queue to be approved but NOT YET APPROVED BY ME! NOT COOL AT ALL, ENTRECARD!