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Has Entrecard doomed itself to be known as just another promising, traffic generating blog widget to render itself useless? The credit pricing structure has now been completely changed at Entrecard and is no longer based on how many cards are dropped on your blog. It is solely based on how many advertisers have placed ads on your blog.

The way pricing works now is every time someone places an ad with you and you accept it, the price of your advertising spot doubles. Starting with 2 points for the first ad and doubling with every ad placed, quickly increases the cost to rather ridiculous levels. The switchover to advertisers determining the price, vs traffic and card droppers determining the price has caused some serious anomalies in the system. Blogs that used to cost no more than 30 credits to advertise on are now commanding outrageous prices of more than 2,000 credits and Problogger, who must have had many ads waiting to show, now costs more than 130,000 credits to advertise with. Correct, that is one hundred thirty thousand credits!

You can obviously see that there will be a settling of the Entrecard economy in the next couple of weeks because no one will want to advertise on a blog that costs 2,000 credits, when it is only worth 30, and of course no one has 130,000 credits to advertise on Problogger much less other blogs costing over 250,000 credits. A positive I see with the new pricing structure is that you will also potentially earn more credits as the cost to advertise on your blog doubles with every new ad placed.

What I don’t like about Entrecard though, is for the very little return it has brought me, I’ve determined I spend way to much time with this system, dropping cards and finding advertisers. It just not economically feasible for one to use their time clicking Entrecard widgets and researching advertisers to see if they are worth 1024, or 2048, or 4096 credits or more. What I determined from the massive Entrecard advertising expeirement was that it was better to just place blanket advertising on the least expensive blogs that had good widget placement and then look at the best return and continue to advertise on a regular basis with those blogs.

It used to be easy to find good deals in the Entrecard system and to be able to consistently advertise with those that brought you the most traffic for the least amount of credits. Case in point, Joel Comm’s blog was an incredible deal for an Entrecard advertiser. I have advertised 4 times on his blog for never more than 18 credits and received about 1 click for every 2 credits spent. However, I just used 7 times more credits than I’ve ever spent to place another ad today on Joel’s blog.

The main problem this new pricing system has created is that it will require even more time to watch you favorite blogs to see when advertising with them will be economical. I forsee people watching on a daily basis to see if the price continues to drop on a blog, before they decide to place their advertising. Sorry, I’m not going to spend any more time with Entrecard. I’d like to spend a lot less time with what is becoming a huge time waster.

I’ll wait another 2 or 3 weeks to see how this all pans out, but the amount of time spent with Entrecard is ridiculous. I’m thinking of dropping the whole deal. I’ve mentioned this before and I still think a solution is to have the ads show for 48 hours instead of 24. That way you could possibly get twice as much return for the same amount of work.

The new pricing structure seems to be an attempt to stabilize the Entrecard advertising economy, but as long as a blogger’s time economy is out of whack with Entrecard, I think Entrecard is doomed.

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