Blog Azeroth

Yesterday, a new pricing scheme was introduced to Entrecard which, in my opinion, will eliminate our ability to use this as a community.

From their admin/developer:



So, while pricing will double like RAM, I don't think the amount of credits we received has changed. Thus, we already have people like BBB costing 1024 credits which I doubt any member of this community can afford.

I think it's time to look for a replacement. Suggestions?

The pricing increases per buying an ad will only come through if you accept every ad request that comes your way, thus allowing you to adjust your ad space accordingly.

For example, your typical blog has an ad price of 128 EC. I request to run an ad on your blog and you accept. This has now bumped your EC price up to 256 for the next potential buyer until the following day. Supposing you don't accept any new ads for 24 hours, your price will go back down to 128 EC.

Working the system this way may result in some people's credits being in limbo until the blog owner accepts or rejects the ad, but it may be the only workaround, unless someone does have a better idea.

It was enough work before without now having to go on the site everyday to pick only one person to advertise or otherwise my price becomes insanely inflated.

I'm giving it a week to make sense or I'll just be removing it.

I will most likely discontinue this service as well.

It isn't hurting to have it active. Just added it to see what'll happen to it, if anything.
The way their current setup works however... the big will get bigger, while the small players don't really gain much at all.

So far, the change has meant two things to me:

1) I have to skip certain blogs that I love to advertise on because they're too expensive when I'm looking, and then I forget to go back and check if they've come down until a few days later.

2) Being one of the cheap blogs, I'm getting a LOT more of the random advertising requests. My reject rate (since I don't put up adds that I don't think my readers will find interesting) must be about 80% since the changes. Before that, it was probably 20%. I'm feeling a lot more 'spammed' on Entrecard, these days.

Of course, part of the problem is also that some of the WoW blogs that I used to enjoy advertising with or getting ad requests from have dropped the Entrecard system, so the WoW pool is smaller while the appeal to the odd blogs is bigger.

I dunno. At this rate, I will probably drop out, but I do think I'll miss the system. I really saw a lot of new blogs because of Entrecard, and I liked the random relevant advertisement potential it brought.

What are others' impressions since the change?

Experimental,
~Rhoe

Playing around with it a bit.
It's not quite so bad, but prices can be kept artificially high by simply not accepting or declining spam advertisement requests.

I notice you can get 4-5 advert requests from some "really weird" blogs in no time, and your price will jump up quite rapidly which will scare away some of the smaller blogs.

If you regularly perform maintenance on pending advertisements you'll keep your price reasonable and improve your response time meter.
Obviously large sites will still be more expensive than others, but as it goes, you'd be paying for the higher popularity of such sites as long as those keep up with accepting and declines.


I was able to find a whole bunch of relatively good value adverts for 4-32 credits. I'm experimenting with the results but it looks fairly positive so far.
Sites like BBB or BRK would get more spam adverts than others, but in the end that only means they'd have to filter the junk more often than others in order to keep their price reasonable. I would recommend asking them directly if you feel prices are too high.

It also really depends on at what time you look at said sites.
I'm looking at the list now, and BBB is showing up as 64-128 credits, BRK 128. Most others 16 or 32. So it really depends when those blog holders clean up the advertisement spam from non-WoW blogs. They are nowhere near the 1024 than you seen once. If there was at one time, then it's probably due to those users' advertising queue having contents during the change not being cleaned up yet. I highly doubt they'll be going above 128-256 anytime recently. The current values seem fairly stable around 16-32 for most blogs.

Anyway, in less than 2 days i got 18 ads approved : http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/1218/picture1nu1.png
And another 10 or so pending. (no, i didn't spend any cash on this) So, the earlier ones are paying attention and still using entrecard actively. The pending ones either have given up on entrecard, or simply don't look trough their pending advertisements very often.

Once the last random "startup" advertiser is gone from my queue, i'll have mostly wow blogs only like most people here. I've kicked off half a dozen random junk and get rich quick shemes as well, so my decline rate will be increasing as well. Don't really care much about that, since everyone here knows you accept wow blogs only. The % doesn't mean much. The response time does though.


Credits

If you're short on ec points, browse trough the categories : http://entrecard.com/category/
Check the expensive ones, or just the highest ranked ones.
If someone lists as:
Casual and relaxed, or just here for the view, don't bother dropping a card on them. You're not likely to get a drop back.
Regular, very serious and addicts however will usually give you a drop card back. Meaning +2 points rather than +1.

There's also a list for "you drop i follow", these people will generally give you a dropback as well. http://leedoyle.com/u-drop-i-follow-ent ... badge.html

Use your "drops inbox", clicking images in there will take you directly to the site of the dropper.
Give them a drop back, and you're likely to receive another drop the next day. Meaning, more credits to spend on advertisements.

If you have stumble upon, check the forum here : http://entrecard.com/forums/
And go to "Promotions and events", people will pay you upwards 20-50 credits for stumbling their blog.

Dropping cards into every wow blog you can find also has the benefit of telling them that you're an ecard user. Your icon will be in their inbox, and both you and them gain 1 ec for each dropped card.
Drop your cards every day, up to 300 limit.

from their faq : http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=d ... _your_card


There's some different ranks for dropping,, don't see them listed in the faq but these are:
* Deeply committed, Deadly serious, Drop masters:
* Takes dropping Very Very Seriously:
* Dedicated droppers with a hint of addiction:
* Consistent, regular droppers:
* Casual and relaxed:
* Just here for the view:

Source : http://hulag.blogspot.com/2008/02/entre ... -wall.html
These are mainly the kind of people you'll wish to drop a card on if you're just looking for extra credits.

This one's funny also : http://www.joetech.com/ec_slot/


However

http://www.fatkidunleashed.com/entrecard-or-exitcard/
Keep in mind that not all the traffic you may gain is completely relevant.
A lot of bots are going around clicking 300 ads for their masters.

You will still gain some extra, actual readers though. As long as you make sure you advertise on blogs relevant to your own. For us, this would be world of warcraft.


My subscriber rate has increased a few, and a few people who normally wouldn't be able to find your blog are now able to locate it.

Anyway, I like the system so far and i'll definitely continue using it. But i realize that not all traffic will be fully relevant. Adsense seems to be doing better as well since using entrecard. If you're an adsense user, it's definitely worth considering.
The only difficulty is getting relevant ads to show up. If you have zero results with context boxes, try using referrals and show image banners instead as you can specify these yourself.


( Damn this is a huge post, i should repost this on the blog )

http://entrecard.com/details/17571
Big Bear Butt, currently available for 32 credits. A bargain for such a popular site.

http://entrecard.com/details/16717
Big Red Kitty, also 32.


The 1024 prices don't really seem to be a common issue.

Update: The pricing system just got changed again.

http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising

They've added a few middle steps between any ad above 256 cost

384
768
1536
3072

Won't change a lot at the lower end though.

I'm working on testing a replacement to the entrecard system for the WoW Blogger community. Using an opensource ad rotating server, I've setup a small group of blogs to join a Twisted Nether link sharing "AD". This Ad would get placed on your site pretty much the same as the entrecard widget without the additional overhead of the entrecard maintenance, etc. It would just rotate equally through the participants.

I'm trying to figure out how to expand this without a ton of additional effort on my part (or too much strain on our provider). Every new ad (125x125 like entrecard) requires I set it up in the system manually (not really that difficult). I have also asked that people host their own images so we don't incur all of the bandwidth costs (looks like you can host it on photobucket, etc..)

I also do not want to be putting up every site out there immediately I was thinking of requesting blogs wanting to join first setup the ad on their own site for at least a week. So, they would follow the instructions at http://wiki.twistednether.net/index.php ... nk_Sharing then email me immediately with their information (hosted image link included).. Once I verify they have included the ad rotator on their site and after a short duration, i'll add them into the rotation.

Additionally, I would need to check somehow that they have the rotator still on their site periodically and if not, remove them from the rotation.

All of this takes some of my time to keep up, but seemingly a lot less, in my opinion, than entrecard.

I dropped entrecard due to the sheer amount of unrelated ads that wanted to be dropped on my site. Twisted nether sounds interesting. Haven't you been doing that for a bit?