Questions and Answers about the pricing change
Written on April 8th, 2008 by phirate
Ok, we’ve had a pile of feedback about the pricing change, and I don’t think I have to tell anyone this was not our smoothest implementation ever. There are a number of common questions I thought I’d start answering.
What happened to my price!?!?
Ok, we posted a blog entry about it and a few forum posts here and there, but what has been crystal clear as a result of this exercise is that we need a much, much better way of getting important stuff out there. As a result we are going to implement an “Emergency broadcast system” to help us communicate important information to you all.
For specific details on the new pricing system, see the blog posts below.
My price is way too low/way too high!
This will fix itself, it may take a day or two the the ad prices will rise and sink to the level that people are generally willing to pay.
Again we are partially at fault here. The pricing was far more disjoint from the old algorithm than we were expecting. Our cursory examination didn’t reveal the extent of the problem. What we should have done (go hindsight!) is to meld the two prices over the period of a couple of weeks so there was a smooth transition.
What does “Most popular” mean now?
It’s the same as it was, the drops you receive on your widget are what contributes to your popularity rank.
Is Entrecard still taking 75% of the ad revenue?
Yes, however we will reduce it if we can, we’re giving it a few days for teh economy to settle and an indication of long-term advert spending to become clear.
Why aren’t I getting email notices of ads at the moment?
We had to turn it off, ads had become so popular that people were getting bombarded with email. We will bring it back in a day or two with a single, combined email per day of outstanding ad requests.
If you’re having trouble that could be fixed, please do post to the Support forums or the feedback box on the dashboard and we’ll do what we can.
Finally, we truly do believe this is an enormous step forward for Entrecard. We believe it will provide more attention to more users, increase the amount of cross-promotion in the network and improve the flow of the economy.
Thankyou also to the many users who have been giving us the thumbs up, and offering words of support. You have never seen panic like the eyes of a site programmer who suddenly realizes that the new feature he just put live was vastly more popular than he expected and the server is crumbling under the load!
April 8th, 2008 at 4:04 am
Works for me, though nobody is jumping on my 32 credits to advertise on blog just yet :p
/sniffle
April 8th, 2008 at 6:53 am
How can someone that joined today have a high ad price than someone who has dropped 300 cards everyday for months on end?
April 8th, 2008 at 9:06 am
okay, yeah, cool! but I still dont get how it now costs 4096 60 advertise on my blog when it was at something like 11 yesterday. that is a crazy fluctuation?
April 8th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Number of advertisers? The lowest priced ad in entrecard went from 2ec to 16ec, so somebody is buying.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I’m not sure how I feel about the changes yet. In a way I understand them, but some of the prices are very high. One thing that does need to happen is removal of the tax for advertisement credits. With these prices its going to be very hard to maintain a level of being able to advertise.
With only being able to earn 300 credits a day, which most people do not have time to do, then a few 512 credits blogs will eat through credits in a hurry and it will take several days of steady dropping for people to earn enough credits to be able to advertise.
Of course I’m laughing at those people now wh told me I was stupid for saving some of my credits and not spending them as soon as I get them.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Yes, tomorrow that will be down to about 2000, the day after that 1000, then 500, 250 until someone purchases an ad on your site, bumping it back up.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:38 am
[...] change?lol Maybe; mine went up to 512. Still don’t understand it so much. More info here: Entrecard Blog
April 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Word, but how does this play into people dropping cards like mad and the traffic from card droppers not valuable?
April 8th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I don’t understand, I receive 1 advertiser a day and accept immediately.
This is at the same time the one in my spot runs out.
That means that it will be halved first and then will be doubled.
Will it cost the same forever?
April 8th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I think the 75% is going to have to drop if you (Entrecard) plan on selling credits.
April 8th, 2008 at 11:35 am
I like the changes, and I look forward to seeing how everything balances out. Great work!
NathanKP
April 8th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I guess I’m not clear on this – we no longer get credit for dropping our cards on other blogs?
How do we earn ec – only through ad revenue, which you say Entrecard takes 75% of the ec?
Sorry – this is just confusing.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The thing that I noticed that is “off” is when you click through to the individual information about a blog (prior to clicking out to see if it would be a good advertising spot or not) where it says how many people have dropped on (your) blog. Checked ours to see what it says – what other entrecard users are seeing – and it says zero have dropped on our blog ever… LOL! That sure ain’t the case. Our own dashboard stats say otherwise, 100s of visitors dropping and/or visiting directly from Entrecard.
In terms of being viewed properly by others as they make up their minds “is it worth it” will that be fixed, too?
(The price jump this morning just had me laughing. New blog going for 29 yesterday and 256 today, though I have been working my buns off LOL!).
April 8th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
[...] new Entrecard Credit system Entrecard earlier today changed the credit system. To be honest they did a huge mistake because this is just [...]
April 8th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Graham, i’m pretty disappointed with this.
IMO the new system pretty much sucks(my point of view), and that the old system was way better.
What do you think of this idea:
statistics feature implementation in the entrecard widget which counts number of unique visitors and/or pageviews and sets the ec price using the blog’s statistics?
cheers,
Tom
April 8th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Glad to hear that entrecard will have an emergency broadcast system – so big important changes like this can be communicated all round.
April 9th, 2008 at 9:41 am
[...] you still have questions after looking at the image above, do check out the questions and answers about the pricing change and myths about the new [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Some are too expensive and not worthy,i advertise at the cheapest but still get constant traffics.
April 10th, 2008 at 1:49 am
I sure hope it “levels out” as suggested. Until it does I’m pretty much stuck… I’m not willing to spend 512 credits for an ad that cost 75 before the change.
April 12th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
one thing i noticed, before, alot of people request for an ad in my site, now lucky to have 1 in a day.
i also noticed that drops in my site have gone down.
i think it’s not good to change the system in the middle of the game. just my 2 cents thought.
cheeers!
May 20th, 2008 at 3:01 am
[...] has been pretty hot lately; a lot less hot since the pricing/buying structure went into place, but I still get some good traffic and I enjoy dropping still. But I don’t do it as much as I [...]