The ins and outs of Entrecard’s Advertising Platform. You’re questions answered!

Written on December 11th, 2007 by Graham

A few people have been asking lately about how many credits you get from running other people’s adverts, and when you actually get the credits, as well as changing pictures on adverts, and a whole host of other things, so I’m going to take some time for a moment to explain the advertising system in detail.

Your Cost to Advertise

This is the formula we use to determine your advertising price:
(average cards received over 5 days) x 2 = Your Price
So, if you receive 10 cards per day, for five days, you will find your price to be 20 credits, or (10) x 2 = 20

How many credits do I get from an ad sale?

In order to keep a proper balance in the economy, and insure that our credits do not suffer the same terrible fate of other currencies that are rapidly declining, we have to keep credits relatively scarce. That means we never “print up new credits” and we try to clear as many out of the system as possible.

When you “sell your ad space” for credits, you earn 25% of the proceeds. So, if your ad space is selling for 400 credits, you will earn 100 credits for each sale. The other 75% of the credit, or in this case the other 300, just get deleted out of the system. Less credits in the system mean more people “generating” credits, which results in traffic.

So yes, you only get 25% of the credits from a sale, but think of it like a sales tax to pay for the traffic. Moving on.

When do I get the credits from an ad sale?

The credits are put into your account after the ad has run for a full 24 hours. This is because if you choose to cancel an ad, while it is running, the advertiser gets a full refund. So, we keep the credits in “escrow” until the ad is completed.

What if I approved an ad days ago, but my price has gone up since then?

When someone applies to advertise on your site, they “lock in the price”, so if you approved an ad days ago when your price was 2 credits, even though your price is now 50 credits, you will still only get proceeds from the sale at 2 credits.

I have an Ad running on someone else’s site.
I changed my picture, but my old picture is still running on their site!

When you apply to advertise on someone’s site, you “lock in” your image and your link, so that the card will run in its entirety just the way the owner approved it.

Hopefully, I’ve help shed some light on this situation. We tried to explain a lot of this in the video and the help section, but I think it was time for a little “Entrecard Advertising 101″

Keep sending your questions via the feedback form and I’ll keep answering them!

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