Changes affecting the Entrecard economy

[...] It’s confirmed! Entrecard no longer wants you to earn money from selling Entrecard Credits which is a big deviation from the original intent of Entrecard when [...]

You have our full support on this Graham I think a lot of us that blog and use this service are ready to help you out in anyway all you have to do is ask

Hi Graham,
I think these changes really are for the better and anything to help stabilise the economy can only be for the good of entrecard and its future sustainability.

As a side note i have started using ooipublisher on my site, are there any plans to integrate the payment gateway with OOIPublisher to offer it as a payment option?
Stuart

Can we get the number of daily drops lowered also?

I think this should help bring this site back to the original goals of helping smaller bloggers get their site out and seen by people rather than a “credit mill” for a few people.

I feel that changes to entrecard nowadays are to the detriment of its members. I hope that things improve on from here and the promised beneficial changes really do take place someday.

One thing at a time. We do hope to soon be able to provide selling EC from the dashboard, in a real supply and demand market, but we need to move towards it with a sustainable model first. This is the first step.

Please understand that our long term goals are a healthy economy with a middle class. That means we want you actually making money off your credits. but, at the same time, we need to figure out effective ways to thwart the credit farmers out there.

Naturally, this should help with the splog/credit farm problem, because there is no longer a financial incentive to farm credits. once we roll out the free market exchange for credits, that incentive will be there again, and we need to figure creative ways to curb credit farmers and gamers. it is our long term goal, but we need to do it right.

as for daily drops, we may lower it, we may keep it the same. I’m in favor of lowering it but I need more input from people.

Awesome news guys! I do have one question: Is there anything on the horizon for ‘cashing in’ your EC credits? So instead of buying, you get money for your EC credits instead? Just askin’

I love the new changes! You actually listen to the public

…..and you have my vote for a lower drop rate!

Maybe you can put up a poll or something on the subject…

Interesting.

Graham, I think you need to look out for #1, ie: make sure EC is sustainable, financially viable, and able to finance its growth.

I disagree with your dropping the price of EC… I think it already too low, and should have been increased (maybe $20 per 1,000)

To balance the increased price, I agree with @contamination, the daily drops should be lowered (I’d be more radical, I think 100 or 150 per day).

This limits the number of people making lots of EC “for free” by dropping.

It will also force more people to actually spend money to get more ECs (hence more money for entrecard).

And each EC will actually become more intrinsically valuable (they cost more to buy, and you cannot earn many by dropping)

I’m not sure what effect this will have on the value of actual adverts, but I think buying an EC advert will be be done a lot more carefully under the scenario I’ve painted.

Oh, and it might temporarily decrease the load on the EC servers for a while.

I always wondered how people on ebay were selling credits and if they were verified in any way. Good to know anyone selling on ebay is against TOS.

Seems like a harsh change, but if it’s going to create a better economy, so be it. Luckily I have saved lots of credits

Next feature, having a bank where we can put a “term deposit” for some months, maybe?

What happens if we have pending shop purchases? Unless I got an honest seller who will contact me about it now — looks like someone just got a free 1500 from me

The first commentator is absolutely right. EC does not want us to earn money from points, but the good effect is we may reduce our high bounce rate because fast droppers will be lesser and may even be converted to regular visitors which is the main reason EC was invented for. Am I right, Graham?

Kudos to you then…

surprise! surprise! just make sure nobody (or blog) gets a heart attack and it will yet another traffic exchange on the net…. anyway, looking forward to what’s next…

These are smart changes.

What can an average user do to help keep this site alive (besides posting about it)?

Just to clarify – is there the tax on transferring credits to/from linked blogs?

My 2 cents….

I think the changes are good. I like the concepts. It is your business and has to be financially viable for you ~ otherwise we all loose. In a situation that grows like EntreCard, there are always changes that need to be made! So I say “yeah” for making the changes. I hope you do not sell. Thanks for everything!

PS. 200 is a good number!

hahaha rest in peace huh? if only all credit farmers would jump ship all at once, I could give myself a pat on the back for a job well done. maybe they will though!

In the meantime, I think we’ll blaze ahead full speed instead of resting in peace. digging our grave is what we were doing before, whether or not it would have been a peaceful rest is up for debate.

see ya later!

@Tracy

It sounds like we need a privacy feature to prevent your other blogs from being displayed, or maybe even allow you to pick which ones you want to display and which you don’t. We should be able to get that in for you. Not sure when though, but it makes sense so we’ll do it.

I read it all over and I still trying to understand the cost ratio on the ad’s… Is it that I pay more for the day but get less for the sale?

Now is there a limit of how many blog I can link? Is it that you can only send 1000ec per blog? Or per account no matter how many blog you have? Since if I use all 10 of my blog set I could still send 10k via 1000ec each… would that be o.k.?

When does this all go in to effect???

I think this will differently add some well needed back bone to the credits… But there are a lot of people that have tons of credits… Will they buy them back? Or how about giving every one one day to spend / give away/ sell all they can to balance out the market… The wipe all credits… Hey, so every one starts a zero… Then we can be like our real life market…. DOH

Well, I sure Gram and the Staff have work many,many, many hours on this… Thanks for all your hard work… I believe this will be better for all of us… well, just not for the ec’s rich ppl….

cc-forum

I agree totally with these new terms you have made. It seems that it was called for already for quite a while. I believe that this gives more credibility to entrecard and for those who use it as well. We want to be known as a community of bloggers/entrecarders who help each other and promoting entrecard as the means to do so.

When I first knew about entrecard I never wanted it for money. I have my other programs for that purpose. My objective was and still is to learn from other bloggers, gain more traffic and increase popularity. I am convinced that entrecard can help me achieve this and unless you go offline, I will continue to do so.

Now what is the point if droppers only objective is to drop, to make a credit, to later sell it for money. My bounce rate is probably 99.9%. I know I have visitors, but what I want from these visitors to do is to spend a little more time reading my blog, making comments, criticizing, whatever, than just using it as a bridge for dropping.

Also agree with @computer aid. Price should be increased and not decreased. Decreasing the number limit of drops per day will most likely decrease the bounce rate of entrecarders.

You have my support. I am not rich and so I can only offer you a “million” words to help you promote entrecard. Just tell me what I can do for you.

I’m personally really excited about this. the money is nice but what’s really awesome is shutting down the splog farmers polluting the system. a total win-win imo.

Very soon we are going to be realistically looking at only high quality blogs. We’re going to move to a manual review process, which will prevent any more garbage from getting in, and then we’ll work double-time to weed the garbage out of the existing base.

I could care less about “how many we lose” -if we get rid of a thousand splogs, awesome.

Yes, the current guideline is 6 months -we started there just to be safe as we work out a more realistic expectation. Three months might even be generous. If someone hasn’t updated in two months, I think it should be out. This will have to be another poll…

Making the requirements more stringent for admission -I am with you with that a 101% Graham. However, my fear is that you might not be able to do the weeding out (16K + blogs now?). And, manual review? Hmmm…I thought you were already doing this.

On the changes you initiated above -darn! what took you so long! ^___^

Kudos Graham!

[...] We appreciate all the feedback we’ve had over the past few days on this topic, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our blog post here: Changes affecting the Entrecard economy [...]

This is terrible IMO. EC is like blogger money, and now it wont be. I used to like to get new members, share my credits and host contests with ECs. Now thats all changed I dont have much use for EC now do i?

Hello EC team, It seems you are making all of the right calls, and from just a little plant in the forest of blogs I appreciate the work and the efforts put in by the team. EC is a great concept and like any project from time to time it needs to unertake adjustments to improve as you move forward.

You have our support and thanks.
Pete

I mostly support the new rules. I also think it was necessary to get rid of the junk (lots of it on here). I think your real value as a company will come in the blog economy you can create.

My thoughts on eliminating junk:
1. Only auto-approve blogs that do not have their own TLD. All others are manually approved.
2. Anyone who doesn’t post on their blog at least once in the last 30 days is suspended.
3. 60 days of no posts and you are terminated.

Those are all very low tech and low manpower to implement and manage.

[...] was surprised to find many comments on the Entrecard blog favoring these moves. EC’s have become basically like blogger money. When I want to sponsor a [...]

I think the solution is expanding out mod team even more, who can just surf and remove/warn offending sites. with a large enough mod team we can go over the entire network with a fine tooth comb

Pete:

Most posts are crap anyway. But at least you force people to actually stay active with their blogs.

I’m new to EC and the whole marketing/networking thing. There must have been something that I haven’t understood about dropping EC’s. Isn’t the whole point of joining EC is to drop 300 cards on sites…period? If you find a site along the way that’s interesting or a post worth commenting on, show them some love, then keep it pushing until you reach the maximum amount of drops for the day. Is that not the concept in a nutshell? I really want to understand this because I don’t want to game the system. If that is what I have been doing, then I will stop dropping cards in that way and conform to the house rules instead.

Is lowering the drop rate also going to lower the amount of traffic to my blog? After the slow, turtle-like load time for EC sites that have occurred lately, I don’t have a problem with lowering the drop rate. I get a nice amount of traffic from EC and I just hope it doesn’t affect my traffic rates in a negative way.

Most of the posts were above my pay grade, but if the changes help make EC better, I’m all for it.

This is a change that is necessary. Just a few months ago, EC credits sold for half a cent each on ebay. Now, the price is less than 1/2 that.

That being said, I used to enjoy selling my excess credits, as I didn’t advertise much, and I need every red cent that I can get my hands on. Once I noticed the sharp downturn in the going rate of ECs, I started advertising much, much more…simply because I refuse to sell credits at the current rates, which are ridiculously low.

As for the current drop limit- I don’t think I’ve ever been able to hit 300 drops in one day. That’s pure insanity. 150 – 200 should be enough for any card dropping fiend.

The advertising price increments are good, and much needed.

Instead of hiring more people to quality check entrecard blogs, you should have a button one the EC toolbar that users can click to ‘flag’ low quality blogs. Then you quality check the blogs that get a high number of flags.

I think the new rules are a God send! I think the drop number could easily be lowered to 200 with out upsetting to many and pleasing those who want it even lower.

Us Mods are out there in force checking on those that have been flagged/reported and we are searching through the network on our own.

Oh, just so you all know… Graham isn’t blowing smoke about the new things that are still to be announced. There really are some big things coming in the next couple of days. Crap now he’s got me doing it!

AHHHH The world is coming to an end. People are taking this so serious. I believe that the people that are taking this so serious are the people who are abusing the system.

NOW … with that said … Do I agree with the process … No not entirely. EntreCard has done a lot for my blog over the last year and half. It has brought thousands of visitors to my site (even it they were there for just a few seconds).

My proposal of which I hereby call Bill 4398 The EntreCard Bailout is as follows:

Limit the daily drops to 100 (Those that are dropping three hundred a day are simply abusing the system).

Open an ECard Bank Or ECBAY (how original) to buy and sell credits.

No limits on transfers (hold on read below before you get excited)

Sites or Users suspected of selling credits via any other means other than the ECard Bank will not only have there account closed and their website, email address and name banned from the system but also the other account involved would have the same done. This will keep people from trading illegally.

I would be more than happy to help in any way to keep EntreCard afloat but honestly … I don’t know that EntreCard will be around long if the current rules stay in place.

Just my opinion!

@sir jorge- I don’t agree with it either, and as soon as we can get sellers back into our economy we intend to do so, but we need to cover our own hides first

Graham
some of the changes are sweeping reforms; others welllll..

anyway – I’m more confused now than ever.
probably like 85% of Entrecarders.

no unlinking of websites – that’s not good.

first problem, I’m a Developer. I build blogs for clients and then turn them over when they are functioning and usually that includes adding Entrecard to the Blog. + giving them some in their account to start up. you may look at my account to see where I’ve made many such transfers to blogs linked to my main blog.

now even all that work is pointless – apparently.

So Where Does That Leave Me ?
S O L in a room full of BLUE SMOKE AND MIRRORS Obviously

Then there’s the issue of not trading or giving credits to other blogs ?

I understand that you want to correct the entre economy; but co’mon you’re smarter than to throw the baby out with the bathwater literally.

if you stop me from rewarding my clients, with EC’s that I sometimes purchase from other ec’r’s who have a surplus; how do you get them to start their own ad programs effectively. as well how do we get enough credits to hold promotions if we don’t accumulate them through purchase ? nobody gives away 5000ec’s accumulated from drops Graham.. even you know that.

Please Remember Graham – as you intended originally, some of us really use them to support our blogs and to build our readership.

Honestly Graham, you are making my hair fall out, and I’m not kidding.

I expected some changes, but have you heard of an Adjustment Peroid ?

I have transactions in purchase for ec’s now and I’ve paid for them so what am I to do now that you say no sales, after my deal to purchase credits is already in process ? does the seller have to return my cash because you just changed the game in the middle of our deal ?

maybe you’ve been watching too much of the bailout on tv. – in case you missed it, The Bailout Deal FAILED MISERABLY FOR THIS SAME REASON – TOO MUCH TAKE. Not enough consideration for those who have GIVEN GIVEN GIVEN till it literally hurts.
and yes I got carpal tunnel from dropping. I never had it in all these years until I started trying to build up credits nightly.. by dropping one ec at a time.. now I need Vicodin to Drop.

the number of drops per night, needs to be realistic; 100 is enough.

You must realize that the more you drop, the less you read and all you really are doing IS TO STOP DROP AND ROLL ON.
this has been proven and clarified here many times as a non subscriber builder.

I am totally confused and believe me my carpal tunnel hurts so much that this group of changes makes me wonder like many others have, when will we get the picture, of what you’re plan really is Graham ?

I Hate Fuzzy Logic and VooDoo Economics

Hi there,

Well certainly these changes have caught me by surprise. Not having been around Entrecard very long I’d never heard the term “credit farmer’s” but I guess in one respect..having bought 5000 from one chap I guess I met one.

While I’m not happy about all the changes (because I didn’t understand them and it created a lot of uncertainty for us here), I support Graham in weeding out the undesirable elements that are damaging the Entrecard credit “economy”.
No doubt to some in other parts of the world their time is worth our money and will devalue the credits worth by credit farming.

I love Entrecard and all the great blogs on it! I want to continue seeing the fertile minds and sites that feed my primary goal of showcasing them to the world every month.

I will work with the system to encourage REAL visitors to sites, and REAL comments. Surfing as in the Traffic Exchanges provides little value to bloggers. Artificial traffic is easily seen through in the duration of visit statistics.

You have my support Graham.

(hey..did anyone notice our new PR2 and Alexa of 391,000? after just ONE month of operation!)

Now Entrecard is not what it was in the beginning. It is a blog promotion tool now. Try to create more quality promotion methods for bloggers.

I believe you should have more control over the economy and tax is a brilliant idea. Good luck.

I would be super happy if he kept all the changes … except for the transfer limit. The transfer limit is what is getting me. I mean, I have done several contest …. matter of fact … suppose to launch on October 1st in which I am giving away a huge amount of credits but this might have just put an end to all that.

Wow ! EC is always makes some surprisings recently, hehehe.

@ Graham:

You could have at least said something before this move, what about these bloggers who have spent a lot of time and energy running and promoting these contests that are giving away entrecard credits? One site is trying to give away 70,000 EC, what about them?

Im not knocking making money, but I just think it as the cost of the members who have help you make EC what it is today.

Go go Graham. Anything that will benefit everybody who cares. I always give the support.

Major respect for admitting it’s because you’re just broke on this site, and not making up some other ridiculous “reason” to cover up the fact you just can’t scale at the moment. I do think you’re on the far verge of deviating to why you made EC… but I do hope all will be better soon for you.

By the way, PLEASE go back to the old pricing system. Just throwing that out there. The new one is still terrible. Just impose a tax or something, you can make a lot. Please.

Kthxbai.

This is great news and I would limit it to 100 drops a day.
Add a splog report button in the next toolbar and make the credits
based off 20 or 10 bucks and have 10% tax and sell them cause they
would be worth more.

I think that if you make a rule that you must spend a certain number of credits per week on ads if you sell credits, it would help a lot. But, I want to be able to buy credits.

I was pissed at first. But you know what? Entrecard is right, they need to cover themselves first. Or else this thing can collapse and we won’t have anything. We’ll then be relegated to what we had before, which is non working traffic generators and iffy web trends.

Maybe throw up adsense, maybe maximize the sites earning potential and hopefully this thing can pay for itself. I’d hate to see it all go away.

We’re working towards a method of sanctioning contests and will update everyone on the blog once its ready.

It will involve some sort of inspection, to see where your credits came from, some sort of planning so we know the exact day you’re giving them away, some sort of accountability -that you’ve been active in the community and we know who you are vs. someone who just shows up today with a million credits suspiciously and wants to hold a “contest”

So once we have some firm ground rules in place, the huge contests can continue because we do not want to see the contest culture of Entrecard die!

Wohhh!Strict Steps have been taken..One that is interesting to see that you have now disallowed selling of Entrecard Credits by others..Now i have to close selling it now onwards(And i have done it also).I think it’s a serious step because No one was buying credits from Entrecard as they were tooo high and entrecard was having bigg losses in that sector..but now i think some might think of buyin at $6/k but i suggest you should reduce it more upto 2.5/k.And just wanted to ask when are these steps going to be implemented?

http://www.smartbloggerz.com

[...] more information, check out the Entrecard Economy Changes official blog post. Rate This: 3.5 Topics: News, Updates/New Features [...]

hi graham… i was very dissappointed with this new change on entrecard.. its unfair to charge tax on transfers to contest winners… u can have an option in transfer, where if we send credits to contest winners, thn we are not charged tax on that

[...] month I had given EC credits to the top droppers but this month I could no longer do that since the recent changes of TOS at Entrecard. So, the only thing that I can give you know is this post to show my appreciation of [...]

Btw, I would like to see the daily drop limit set to 200.

Hi Graham,

I agree with the new terms, but that means there could not be a huge prize contest, like the one featuring in my dashboard, I guess it were 70,000 EC,Did it means this contest will need to cancel?

Did I still be able to send Credits to friends?

I have a proposition regarding the 1000 EC limit.

I think you dont need to put a limit for contest or any giveaways of EC´s, the only you may need it is to give us a Certificate or Badge that allows others users see that we actually BOUGHT all of those EC´s we are giving away.

So if someone have that badge that links to Entrecard the people can tell that we are following the Entrecard Rules.

What did you think of this Graham? Doing this you will ensure that all those giveaways of EC´s were actually paid to you before.

I have another question, What about OIO publisher, they have a new feature that allows you to use EC´s, Will this feature no longer be Allow it by Entrecard rules?

Thanks, Keep up with good work.

People that want to help should do something about it at least weekly. I’ll do what I can, every little bit helps.

I’m going to be honest, I don’t like the new rules, afterall if you are allowed to sell credits we should be able to too.

Hey – you said it was free to transfer between my linked blogs… so why does it try to charge me the 12.5%?

Could you possibly have a counter somewhere showing how many credits we have available left for transfer during the week?

I just want to know how many credits I can transfer.

[...] only that but now they are looking to hire a Content Correspondant, came up with a serious update to their business model and also announced a Partnership with OIO Publishing for Blog [...]

let me try to give simpler word this time for my suggestion..

-Free Basic members can drop and earn credits. Use them for buying advert only or use it in the Marketplace. But cannot transfer or receive EC credits to other members directly.

-Premium members same with basic but can transfer EC credits or receive EC credits. Have premium members pay $1/month to EC

Just be more economic wise on pricing flat rate in your EC to have many premium members ^^