Dropping Entrecard Is The New Trend
There’s a really excellent post on John Cow’s site about his decision to stop displaying the Entrecard widget. You should read it for yourself but his main reasons are that the traffic has a high drop rate and that sites with little traffic have huge valuations. I saw this same phenomenon happen here myself.
His understanding of how blogs are valued is a bit off though. While dropping cards on other sites does raise your exposure and presumably lead to reciprocal drops it does not directly increase the price of your own ad spot.
Anyway, the comments on this post are really good and everyone makes some pretty strong arguments either for or against Entrecard. I’ve said this before here but it really comes down to the fact that Entrecard is a better community than it is a traffic generator. If you can come to grips with that fact sooner, rather than later, you’ll probably be better off as a user in the long run.
Having said all of that…
I might be dropping the widget from this blog soon myself but for now it’s staying.
This isn’t the greatest blog in the world and Entrecard played a large role in getting it to a higher level than where it was before but, as I predicted, it’s becoming too much of a time sink. My biggest reason for removing Entrecard is that the number of advertiser requests related to my interests is dwindling down to nothing and I’d like to keep everything here as related as possible to web development.
I’m sitting on a decent stack of credits so I won’t be leaving before I’ve burned through them on more advertising. After that, I’ll make a decision on whether or not to keep the widget around.
I came here because of a post on the Ross Johnson site. I agree about the value of the Entrecard drops. Someone like myself with little traffic (about 20/day avg) can drop lots and lots of cards but buying an ad on my site may not be worth the amount of credits you have to pay for it. I like to leave my ad on a variety of sites because I believe that just because a person stopped by to visit a site about blogging (or whatever), does not mean that they might not like to stop by and look at my artwork. Most people have a variety of interests and I have picked up several subscribers along the way that do not have anything to do with art, they just enjoy my artwork and my blog. Some people claim to be dropping 600 cards per day, but having dialup, I find that would be impossible unless I spent the entire day doing absolutely nothing else. Entrecard is great but I am not into spending the entire day dropping cards.
Comment by Sue — January 14, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
I think the limit is 300 drops per day. If that’s wrong and someone knows the real figure please let me know.
The “problem” right now is that people ARE spending all day just dropping cards and driving up prices to levels that aren’t justifiable. And that appears to be John Cow’s point.
Comment by Link — January 14, 2008 @ 1:35 pm
John Cow went ahead and posted without knowing the formula for calculating EC points.
It doesnt matter how many you drop !! Its how many card people drop on you X 2.
Read his comments… ull see
Comment by Alfred — January 14, 2008 @ 2:18 pm
I mentioned his misunderstanding in this post but you also can’t deny that dropping cards yourself leads to more cards being dropped at your site as people follow each other around making drops.
Comment by Link — January 14, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
Thats absolutely true, as I understand it, small blogs take EC as a way to meet new bloggers and start developing small communities but for big ones… emm I dont know :P
Comment by Alfred — January 15, 2008 @ 7:37 pm
I’ve always thought that 10 quality users is a lot better than 1000 crap ones. Sadly, Entrecard has sent me mostly the latter – with a 87& bounce rate compared with 50% normally, and after splurging on my credits yesterday the inevitable drop is not too far away :).
Comment by The University Kid — January 16, 2008 @ 1:32 am
i really appreciate the courage it took you to post this knowing that people who drop from entrecard are mobbed by entrecard fanatics. for me, i will admit that entrecard has somehow increased my traffic. however, i don’t really feel excited about it. maybe deep inside i prefer to see my see stats with higher pageviews per visitors and average time spent on my site. i agree with you for saying that dropping cards all day can sometimes (if not always) interferes with writing good articles. it’s just so difficult (but not impossible) especially when the blog owner is a single individual and not a company composed of numerous individuals. however, i will stick with entrecard for a while and see what will happen next because up to this period, i’m still observing the system. goodluck with your future decision. :-)
Comment by jessie — January 17, 2008 @ 6:25 am
With a bit of luck the amount of crazy folks who drop like mad will level out, and make the system fair. Wishful thinking hey!
Entrecard has increased my traffic and brought in new readers, and I have found great new blogs like this one through it. Time will tell.
This could be just the initial rush..
Comment by Chris Brandrick — January 18, 2008 @ 1:44 pm