Implementation of sponsor ads program postponed until Oct. 5

I would consider paying the $50 fee … AFTER you remove the 75% tax paid on the ads. There really is absolutely no sense to pay $50 a year AND have to give up 75% of your credits to taxes. I don’t really understand how anyone could consider that to be a cost-effective form of blog promotion when there are so many other places out there ….

Please consider removing the tax.

Thanks !

When the sponsor ads program is implemented, I suggest that a new Category in the Campaign be created, this time composed of all paying users.

The category could either be titled as Preferred Users Blogs OR Sponsor Ads-Free Blogs

I think this a wonderful announcement and really appreciate the fact that you did listen to all of us. I will most likely stay now, pay the fee and start taking ads again once all of this is implemented.

Thank you for listening to us who really did have honest concerns and worries about our blogs and content!!

I will be in a holding pattern until this implemented!

Sincerely,
Jackie

I know this is good news for many people, but paying a fee is just not the direction I want to go. While EC has given a big boost to my stats, hardly anyone stops to read my site. Perhaps that is my fault; poor content. Be that as it may, I really don’t see the point of paying $50 for just numbers and spending all that time dropping cards. I think my time would be better spent upping the quality of my site and focusing on mometizing so that I can enjoy the fruits of my labor rather than others.

You have to be kidding. Fifty bucks a year to keep paid ads off my blog. You’ve not going to get that from me.

Why don’t you just tell us all the truth. You want Entrecard paid ads only. No free anything. Because that’s exactly what your newest plan is doing. Everyone is paying.

Wow! I am overcome with emotions. I have 4 blogs with you guys. I love your community of bloggers. I hope there aren’t too many that leave.

I am a novice blogger and do not have money like that to hand out. My blogs are visited by Children and I’m concern about the ads that will be placed. i will probably have to leave Entrecard.

this is really crazy, I just read the handbook and it still states that a purchased ad will run for 24 hours. It does not look like the rules are being honored. i realize you need to update the Handbook..That should be done first. that way is can be agreed upon and understood where entercard is going.
thank for posting my comment this time. I am checking, you haven’t post any of mine yet.
This is not a good practice…It doesn’t show fairness to others view.

Oh Dear…

I am so baffled and dismayed and confused. I left EC over the ad debacle before BECAUSE I set my advert settings to NO PAID ADS and would get up in the morning and honest to God there might be TWENTY paid ads waiting to be approved and NO regular ec ads.

The best suggestion I’ve seen here is the double widget. If people ARE going to take some paid ads, and as I’m a minister, I absolutely HAVE to have a say about what goes on my blogs. There are a lot of blogs that are objectionable to me and perhaps mine to others. We deserve the right to deny ads that are not suitable for us.

TOO, AND I THINK THIS NEEDS TO BE HEARD…

When you are trying to compare what you are doing to what other ad networks do, here’s what you are missing. And I think this is BIG.

When I signed on with Adjitize and CMF (After I’d left here,sadly, before.) I KNEW what I was getting into. I pay Adjitize monthly, and buy a certain number of credits to “Purchase” the places I want to advertise on CMF. NOTE AGAIN: I WENT IN KNOWING THIS.

Entrecard was billed and promoted as being FREE and as soon as all of us who were breaking our backs to get the drops in everyday, but glad to do it because we believed in and appreciated EC so much, and were proud to be a part of this wonderful community, as soon as WE worked our butts off to get it going and it became a success, THEN Graham wanted to start making money and virtually pulled the rug out from under our feet with little notice. It looks like you are doing this again. And it’s not fair.

I only came back to ec about a month ago because I was told Graham had sold it, there were no longer paid ads to worry about, I actually spent money BUYING ec’s from you to get started when I really didn’t have the money to do so, but was glad to get a boost to get started, and then KAPOW!!!! Here come the paid ads.

Again, you can’t make comparisons. EC is NOT Adjitize (their monthly fee puts you in a systems that rotates you on thousands of ads for a whole month for a monthly fee) or CMF whose ads are VERY cheap and when you buy one yours is in the system of your chosen blogs a month. What you are proposing is unfair, exploitive business tactics, and again, not what Entrecard was promoted as being.

I love EC. I have many many friends here, and three blogs here. And I, like Kathy, am supposing you mean $50 per ACCOUNT, not blog. If you charged a fee, per account, in monthly payments, I would stay. I live on a fixed income. I cannot afford these fees. And it’s pretty steep for what we get. Since I came back ec wasn’t what is used to be since “The Great Debacle” over ads the first time. I’m still glad to be here and there are many good points about EC. But you can’t invite people to your house for dinner and then charge them for the meal. YOU invited us. We made you a success. Now you’re charging us for dinner.

There are so many things here that simply are not right.

There has been SO much downtime which means not only can we not drop, our ads running somewhere and those kind enough to buy with ec’s ads on OUR blogs are totally missed, and while you are wanting money from us, did you ever offer to compensate US for the downtime when we lost ads, and sometimes ads we spent DAYS accruing credits to buy?

Also, where is the plus in all of this for we who made you what you are so now you think you have the right to make money on us. I CHOOSE who puts what on my blog. I choose the ads here I want and reject those I don’t want. If we HAVE to take a paid ad 15% of the time, how are WE, as well as those who have “paid” via ec’s, to be compensated? You want to take 15% of our time and then CHARGE US too? And you think THAT is fair?

Sing the chorus with me everybody…. YOU offered a free service and as soon as we made you successful with all of our dropping and working with one another, you wanted to take what we’d worked for away and charge us to boot!

I don’t mind a small monthly fee, but one thing I don’t understand is the question about taxation? Tax us for what? and why?

And when someone rushes this fast to try to implement such BIG changes, there is usually something fishy going on. Why not a gradual working through months of restructuring rather than hitting us over the heads with a baseball bat and while we’re out you change the whole system and it starts NOW. Oct 5? How much different is that, really?

I have one final word to say and this is one thing I REALLY have to get off my chest and want others to know about.

When I came back to ec, my blogs, which had been near the top of their categories, now had to start all over. My mother is dying and I don’t have the time to drop as much as I want to right now so I was prepared to buy a few ec’s to get started while I was dropping to earn more. You have a marketplace store. A nice gentleman was selling ec’s at VERY good prices and had for some time to other people. I came in, bought some at HALF of what you charge, and the credits went IN my account and within minutes were taken OUT of my account, the man booted from ec, and told he wasn’t supposed to do that and so on. To your credit you eventually did credit me back half of what I was buying, BUT, you ALLOWED this man to operate in your store. If you did not notice what he was doing then you weren’t minding the store, so to speak, very well. And to yank the credits out from under am honest person who had no idea it was “illegal” because the seller was in your very own store, is just wrong.

We used to be able to buy ec’s on eBay. You stopped that. Someone had taken a lot of time dropping to accrue enough to sell a few at an affordable price to those who needed a few extras and you chopped them off at the knees. This becomes more like a dictatorship than a business.

And the recent ec’s that I have bought from you, in good faith, mean WHAT now? Now I have gotten myself back into a system, as I’m sure others unwitingly have, only to have you change so many things so fast that it’s as though we just threw our money away, and trust me, most of us can’t afford to do that. It was an investment in my place at EC and I was willing to do it at first. But before the money was cold in your hand you started changing all the rules. There are so many if’s, ands, and buts I honestly can’t even understand what’s going on. I am completely lost.

One last thought for your to consider. One of the most shocking things to me, last time the paid ad situation came up, is that I was getting LOADS of paid ads, and literally NO ONE was buying ads with dropped ec credits. And what I saw was that a lot of people who used to advertise with me via the drop system, were now Buying Ads! It takes an incredibly long time to drop enough cards to even advertise on the half way popular ads. Many of my favorites are up to 4000 or so credits for one ad one day. How can that happen? That is a system out of whack. When our own people, with blogs we love, who didn’t want paid ads on theirs, start paying for ads because the dropping is to all-consuming to do and have a LIFE too, and they start buying ads, what happens to the whole ec system then?

I’m sorry for the tirade but this is a very hard time for me and this ec thing has just about knocked me out of the ballpark.

I would also like to be paid back for all of the ec’s I bought from you if you implement this system, because even as I was buying them in good faith, you were making plans to change the system. Had I known I wouldn’t have bought any. I’m sure Paypal and other businesses you depend on would not be pleased with how we’ve been treated here. How does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot?

Maitri, very disappointed and sad about this whole business. EC will never be the same again if you do this, and people in the blogging community will know what you’ve done to your members, and people are already dropping like flies around here, some of your best people are gone or going. Tread very carefully…

I will be leaving Entrecard and I figure my wife will also because that is $100 for Wanda and I. We simply can’t pay that. Don’t have that kind of money to hand out for just anything anyhow.

And I still stand when I said I will not make people that work by dropping to advertise and paying with ec’s have to share a widget with something that can just dish out a buck or two for advertising.

I am not opposed to paid ads but agree that we should be allowed to choose which ones to display. I like the idea of the double widget and the only reason I think EC balks at this idea is because they don’t believe anyone would click them. So…what if you did the double widget and offered double credits for clicking through a paid ad? You’re already offering credits for other offers and this would benefit both the paid advertisers and the EC members who took the time to check them out.

I have been reading a lot about the proposed 2-widget ad slots–1 slot for ec paid ads and the other for sponsor ads.

But the widget for sponsor ads must have also a “decline” or “reject” function, just like the current widget.

I believe this 2-widget proposal coming from other users, notably from JoeTaxpayer, is a good and viable option.

Other ad networks, like Adgitize and CMF Ads, have even a 6 ad widgets for their members to choose from.

So why can’t Entrecard design and make available the 2-widget ad slots?

I just spent my first evening doing Adgetize and EC. Almost every single EC widget is buried and impossible to find. When I did find them it took me forever to get your server to respond.

With Adgetize I zipped through no problem. I fear I have made a grave grave mistake with my actions today.

It was a costly one. But, sometimes lessons are hard learned. I felt that heavy sinking feeling all day….every ad bought is simply going to be wasted.

Almost every single blog is with Adgetize now and it runs so smooth. I not only made my quota in about an 1 1/2 hour but I am over for the day. Which means it’s not only free but also I will earn a little.

I really believe in my heart that you guys aren’t going to be able to turn this around. You just waited too long and made too many poor choices!!

Well, well, well, I really should have spent a day out there before proceeded. You guys are going down hill…I’m so so sorry!!

I don’t have $50 for something like this, so I guess I’ll stick with the paid ads. Please keep them clean and the content respectful.

If we got a double widget, one for ec ads and one for paid ads, would we still be able to deny objectionable(to us, as individuals) paid ads?

And are there any benefits or perks for members who accept paid ads. I think for a free program to go this route there had better be some kind of incentive. No, “You pay $50 or you have no say about the ads,” and then we’re stuck with either paying or having things that are objectionable.

You are driving people away in droves and I’m with Jackie, you can’t even find the widgets half the time anymore, people are burying them. Mine are at the top, and if I were forced to take paid ads in which I had no say, I’d just quit ec. To ask us to pay $50 a year is just wrong. Most of the people I know here would have a hard time coming up with that, especially in these hard economic times.

Many programs have something set up through PayPal where you can pay one small fee per month, and stop it any time you no longer want the service. I think a lot of us are afraid to commit to something ongoing or pay a year at a time when things are so shaky around here and terrible things (for us) keep coming up, almost everyone I’ve talked to are leaving or at least waiting to see if you’ll do some decent, honorable thing about this.

And why are you not addressing anyone’s posts? A lot of people have written in by now.

Maitri

Please forgive me for being off topic. But, the servers are running great today.

Hang in there everyone!! Unless the world ends in the next few seconds, hours or days, I am almost sure we will all survive!!

Perhaps the fee could be lowered or something? $50 is really not a small amount for a small fry like me.

One thing to remember to is that last time when the paid ads started every other widget we saw had the same ad.

Now thing about that carefully.

EC works because we click on the ads to visit each others blogs.
When all we see is the same ad over and over again, people stop clicking on ads to visit each other.

Think very carefully about that.

Cindy, please can you confirm if this is $50 per blogger or $50 per blog?

I’m very sorry but my husband just informed me that he refuses to $50 and then still have me sit here hour after hour a day doing drops.

I really wanted to stay. But, he is not getting hardly any runs and we aren’t going to be able to afford it.

I really am very very sad over this!! I wish everyone the best!!
Jackie

Hi everyone,

Thank you for everyone’s feedback. As we mentioned in our earlier blog, Entrecard will be using 15% of the ad inventory to serve ads to sponsors in order to keep our service free. We believe this is extremely fair considering some free ad networks use 50% of their inventory to serve sponsor ads. We understand that users fear that the ads served might conflict with their blog. Because of this, we will give users an option to opt out of the ads that they do not find appropriate on their blog. This is also free.

Now, users are thinking that they have to pay $50 a year just to use our service. This is not the case. Entrecard will remain free for all users because it will be funded by the sponsors, not the users. The $50 per blog fee is just another option for users that would like to opt out of the sponsor ads program completely. It’s an option and not mandatory.

There are have been many options suggested by our users and we’ve read through them. However, at this moment, we feel this is the best approach to take. Even with the options we have made available, we understand that many of our top users do not agree with us, expecting the worst and are planning to quit our service entirely. We don’t disagree with anyone leaving a company because of bad service. We just ask that you stick around and try it out for the next month and see what happens before making your final decision. If you choose to leave now, we hope that Entrecard has been able to help you achieve some of your goals as a blogger and that you are welcome back anytime.

Cindy
Entrecard.com

Because of our recent changes, we have a small group of users who are extremely angry and are using the blog comments to encourage other members to rebel against Entrecard. Due to this reason alone, we have decided to disable comments. This will be restored in the near future. However, if you still have questions about our services, please email support@entrecard.com. All emails will be answered within 24 hours. Thank you so much!

Cindy
Entrecard.com