Entrecard Changes
Sep 5th, 2009 by Shaun Carter
Entrecard is that 125×125 ad widget you see on the right sidebar of this site. Created by Graham Langdon as a way for bloggers to find each other and efficiently advertise their brand across a network of like minded individuals. Entrecard has taken the traditional banner exchange of yesterday to a new dimension.
Some troubling changes have been made lately and it is leaving me to wonder whether I want to continue running the widget on my blog. Historically when people clicked the “drop” tab at the bottom of the widget they and the blog owner would receive one credit each to use for advertising on other blogs. This “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality worked great and everyone benefited. I got credit for another user clicking on my widget so I get something for keeping the widget installed and the user doing the clicking gets credit for their effort. Recently, Entrecard has removed the one credit earned by the blog owner and is now only awarding a credit to the person clicking “dropping” the widget.
This change in the payout ratio was enacted to curb “credit inflation” which has apparently gotten out of control. I think this disincentivizes publishers from dedicating space on their blog to Entrecard and the change should have instead been applied to the way ads are purchased on other blogs. Currently, everytime a new advertiser buys a one-day advertising slot on a blog the price to place that same ad doubles for the next person. So, the more advertisers a publisher has in queue, the higher each subsequent advertiser pays. As you can imagine, this can get expensive very quickly and become a problem.
I wish the Entrecard team would have looked at a more dynamic advertising inventory system to better charge users for advertising on blogs. If there was a better equation for setting ad rates, then credits would be utilized more and thus keep inflation to a minimum. A better sytem for selling credits needs to be looked at as well. Currently Entrecard will buy EC credits back at the rate of $1 per thousand. This needs to become a market based price that fluctuates based on the supply of credits in the network and the desire for users to sell those credits.
Even though the system is now geared more toward users who click widgets all day, it is still a useful tool for me to find other interesting blogs to read and get some more readers to my own. But, time will tell whether these changes will significantly impact the user experience.
Technorati Tags: entrecard, exchange, graham langdon, traffic exchange, banner exchange
