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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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!
Well said? Great information, keep up the great work!