So Phirate and myself have been talking about experimenting. Changing the system for a little bit to see if we can make it better by doing something drastically different.

What if members were to get 2 credits when they RECEIVE a drop, and NO credits for actually dropping?

Droppers still receive a benefit because dropping is still an act of self-promotion, and we would reward heavy droppers and reciprocal droppers in other means. But the people who are chain dropping will have zero incentive to do this to earn lots of credits.

Thoughts?

No credits I'm going to stop spending hours every day dropping. No incentive. Before I switched to mostly reciprocal dropping, random dropping got me one in 4 visits. Not a good enough incentive for me to spend that kind of time involved. I already see a slowdown in dropping and I think that would be the clincher ... it would come to a screeching halt.

I think that's a horrible idea.

Why would anyone even bother dropping then? It's hard enough now getting even half of your drops reciprocated.

There would be absolutely no point to going and looking at anyone else's site. Might as well form a "scratch my back, i'll scratch yours" group and drop on X number of people a day and that's it knowing they will drop back.

That doesn't solve the problem of people busting their butt and getting little to no return, so I don't know why you are even discussing such a change. All that does is make it worse. Why would I bother to drop 300 cards a day when I would end up getting less overall than I normally would. Let alone, those people who already don't drop for crap but are at the top of their categories will be even further rewarded.

How about you get 2 for dropping and one for return drops. That solves two problems: One- The people busting their butt are getting the "acknowledgment" they deserve for actually dropping cards, and two- the people at the top who just sit there and get drops but rarely return them (and there are several like this with "relaxed and causal" dropper titles) will lose out because they aren't doing the work like everyone else, which then gives the people doing all of the work at least an equal chance to compete with these other ads (that are not dropping back as much.)

Furthermore, I don't see "Chain dropping" as a real issue since you were smart enough to put a limitation of 300 per day on there, so we can't exactly make any more than anyone else could, in theory, by dropping cards (unlike if it were unlimited). I think the idea is to get people to participate more, which will then increase traffic, return drops, and should make everyone happy in that sense. I think the idea you discussed will discourage further participation, where if you reward those dropping they will continue to do so. Perhaps take my suggestion into mind. :)

I don't like the idea either. Not everyone reciprocates.

I think the system at the moment is pretty good.

That bring my dropping to a screeching halt.

I'll be the first to leave.

I just think the max per day should be dropped drastically. When I've mentioned this previously in the forums, many people object and say that "people will just do what they want." But, regardless, the system is highly promoting chain droppers that do 300/day - myself included - by seeing who can endure spending a few hours every day just to keep on top.

I try to drop 300/day, but it really detracts from important activities like.. blogging. I wonder, do people that "do what they want to do" and casually drop cards receive enough benefits from the system?

If the limit was 50 cards/day, you would have to be much more selective about who you drop on. Users would build connections with other bloggers in order to keep receiving one of their 50 cards per day. Higher quality blogs will emerge because standard chain dropping tactics will become obsolete.

Then, as I mentioned a thread or two ago, internal traffic could begin becoming higher quality, as people have more time to devote to reading each other's blogs.

Would it be possible to experiment with a different number of drops? I don't think that there would be enough incentive if people were not directly rewarded credits for dropping.. If you want dramatic changes, this is my best advice.

Seriously, do people love chain dropping within Entrecard?

I say change it.

The thing that bugs me the most about this site, and maybe I am doing it wrong, is that I want to get more people visiting my site. To me, that means people who are interested in my ad, and not people looking for drop credit. And I am no better than they are.

So - since I am getting a lot of drops done per day, my ad price is getting up there. So that's cool. But the only reason I want credits is so I can advertise, and that is where it breaks down for me.

In the celeb category, it currently costs 146 ec to advertise with me. My Alexa rank is 74,645.

The number three spot in Celebs costs 251 ec's to advertise, and their Alexa Rank is 325,621.

Why do I care how good people are at entrecard? Makes no difference to me. I can spend 11 credits to get an ad on a much more popular site.

If people's ad cost were based upon the impressions of their ads then you would have something to save up for. So make people drop like fools and give them credit for it - but base their ad cost on their website, not their amount of free time.

Just my 2 cents

@Powered by: Not sure what you mean. I drop 300 a day to try to keep my position and ez-money-online's position - that's 300 day each site and the people at the top of the categories, with a few exceptions, they are the ones who drop daily when I drop on them. You have to bust ass to get up there and stay there. If you don't, you soon slide down.

I'm not sure what Entrecard's goals are for the long term. Are you an ad service or a social network? If you're another blog catalog or bloglog, just go ahead and throw up coding for little profile pages and be done with it. I'm a member of two such sites and never visit either one of them. There's no incentive to do so. Earn Entrecredits = buy ads. No credits, no ad buying and no dropping. I hear the complaints about the pricing, but guess what. All those top spots are always sold out. Not so with the cheaper ones. I've bought ads from cheap sites and from the expensive ones and I'll take the traffic I get from the expensive ones any day. Almost without fail, I get 100-200 and more visitors when I'm able to purchase an ad from a top spot, expensive site. Probably because they put a lot of effort into driving traffic, dropping cards and they probably do so in other networks as well.

@ Sense to Save - I drop about 200 a day and then leave the other 100 or so for people I may have missed or newfound blogs etc.

I am very very big on reciprocating, and would really hate to see a cap that would cause me to miss someone in my inbox because I was at my max for the day. That's one of the primary reasons I don't do 300 now.

@ Mogul - I think what "Powered" is saying is that there are some people in the top three who benefit from being there because they get drops and in turn don't drop back. Now, that's not saying EVERYONE in the top three. But there are some.

@ Superficial - I don't think rewarding people who get drops would help that problem though. Why would I even bother to click on an ad then? So you can get 2 credits for being ad savy? You would need those drops to begin with to even move up in the ranking.

I don't know. It just sounds like a bad idea to me.

I need to understand why advertising with someone who is good at entrecard is good for my site's traffic.

@Dot Com Mogul - That is exactly what I am saying - top Entrecard sites may not always bring external visitors to your site, but they can help you receive internal Entrecarder visits, which can be much more significant.

I don't think that Entrecard should become a social networking site. That is, you shouldn't have to be Mr. Popular and correspond with everyone to get noticed. However, I do think it should encourage people to drop cards on sites they like, and eliminate chain dropping.

Lowering the drop limit should make dropping cards more meaningful.

@superficial: Basically, it's not. It increases your Alexa rating big time but that will disappear as soon as you leave Entrecard. My comments have increased and rss subscriptions to a minor degree. There is so much hit and run internal traffic but not all of it. Some of these blogs get outside traffic, so choose the ads you buy wisely, and you can benefit from that. I get more traffic daily than just the amount of drops I get. My external traffic has increased, and fake or not, I'll take the Alexa rating ... my motto ... fake it until you make it. lol.

@Sense to save. I disagree. Lowering the drop cap will only serve to lower visiting altogether. There is already a decrease in dropping. I've heard numerous people saying that and I am experiencing it myself. Let's put it this way. I have a busy work life. I work a lot of hours. I don't join networks for social purposes. I don't join them to discover new blogs. I can easily find new blogs in my areas of interest without spending hours a day dropping on blogs that are not in my area of interests. I visit because there is an incentive to do so and that is to earn credits and buy ads. I participate in the forums so I put my two cents in and get to know people, but socializing and new blog discovery is not my primary purpose to being here.

@Dot com mogul - Those exceptions are the ones I am talking about. People who do the work should be rewarded for it, like most have, but some of those who just happen to be plastered everywhere (Almost never actually using the "entrecard ad widget", which makes a difference imho) don't return a thing barely but remain at the top.

By rewarding people to drop, you are encouraging them to drop more, which will also directly make people want to advertise more because you are more likely to get dropped on if you advertise on multiple sites.

Another suggestion I have is to increase the size of the drop box. I say this because it will allow people to return the drops of people who dropped on us. This encourages the full use of the entrecard system, "Drop and drop back" which increases traffic, and greatly rewards those who are using the system to it's full potential.

So then - if the ad prices are based more upon the worth of the site you are advertising on, and less on people's ability to play entrecard.

You can leave the credit gathering portion the way it is, and you can give people a reason to want the credits, no?

It would accommodate for people that don't get many drops but only if it was a LARGER number like 5.

Btw my reciprocal drops look like a mountain slope with a Huge drop off for the last week.

I am very busy, too, with work. Doesn't it take a long time for you to drop 300/day? No social networking would be required. Just some degree of promoting each other and support each other through drops - without SO much work.

My vote - don't take away the credits for dropping. But perhaps add some kind of a bonus for getting dropped on - if 1 credit is too much, a small bonus, like 1 credit for every 2 drops on - but at least it is something. This might also encourage folks to drop on blogs they like or support or have build up a network with - rather then just random "power" dropping. I always drop to drop on a few new folks every day - and I think it would be very cool to get them started off with a little bit of extra credit.

Once a card in your inbox is dropped back on it should disappear from your inbox - making room for more. I try very had to drop back to all - but I know I can't be here all day which means I'll miss some as more drops are added.

It is all way to complicated for me to try to figure out what the implications are of giving credit for what and how much - but I do know PLEASE keep the credits for dropping.

I think that this will likely lead to more lists of reciprocal drop clubs and less browsing.

It's a leap of faith that those who you drop on will reciprocate and those who don't will quickly find themselves abandoned.

It seems that most people are expecting a particular return on their time and this is just too dependent on others.

I like that you are considering other options but I'm not sure this one will work.

SB

Ok, ok, some great feedback here.

What about this: Credits ONLY for reciprocal drops. Every time a reciprocal drop occurs (ie. someone drops on you, and you drop back) each person earns two credits.

This way, dropping and earning credits would be more intricately based on who's visiting who, and who you're visiting. Though it does complicate things a little bit, especially for newcomers.

@sense: Yes it takes time to drop that many cards, but I've worked hard on a system that works for me and that is 200 are reciprocal and 100 are new and otherwise non-reciprocal. That's more than fair to me. When you drop on these blogs daily, whether it's power dropping, reciprocal dropping ... whatever ... you get a feel for their content and their site. Some of them become your favorites and you actually read a bit, but many will be outside of interest. Everyone's tastes and interests are different. When I see a blog that interests me, I check it out more thoroughly. That being said, I am not a big commenter. Just something I don't do much of and don't want to do much of. If I really have something to say or someone has really pissed me off, I might comment. Other than that, I read and keep my thoughts to myself, so you can't really judge by commenting alone whether or not people who visit are interested in your site.

Graham: respectfully .. isn't that going to diminish exploration altogether and reinforce reciprocal dropping? Everyone will only get their reciprocal lists together real tightly until they have a list of 300 dedicated reciprocal droppers and they will drop only on that list daily. There's no incentive to explore or even to try new blogs.

My advice: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm still searching for the answer to the question which is "How do I attract people to my site who will at least poke around for a minute or so, and read through some of the content to see if it's something they are interested in".

I have a pretty radical idea, but what if we did something like this... Reduce the number of max drops per day from 300 to 50 or so. However, ADD a new feature where people get bonus credits for additional time spent on a site. It could work something like this: The initial drop gets 1 credit.

Then, for every 15 seconds the user is on the site (regardless of page they are on, the key thing is that they are on the site), they accumulate a another credit up to a max of 4 credits (1 minute total). (i.e., initial drop = 1 credit, 15 seconds = additional 1 credit, 30 seconds = 2 addtl credits, 45 seconds = 3 addtl credits, 60 or more seconds = 4 addtl credits)

Therefore, a user could earn up to 5 credits by visiting a site, and they can choose to do this for up to 50 sites per day. This would net a user up to 250 credits per day.

I realize there's some technical challenges here, so what if the initial drop triggered the creation of a session/timer for the user on the entrecard servers. When the user chooses to leave, they click a button saying that their done. The key is that a user can only have ONE session/timer running at a time. Loading up 1 site and starting a timer, and then loading a second site at the same time would wipe out the first timer started (the thought being, the user left the first site, or is trying to game the system...). Users can then choose to get a quick 50 credits by chain dropping, or they can actually visit and poke around a few sites and get their credits. Visiting 10 sites and reading the content will net the user the same 50 credits. However, they can go far beyond 50 credits if they choose to visit and read more sites.

Now, another thought to help generate traffic to NEW blogs so we don't get a clique of people visiting each others sites and not exploring anything new...How about if a user received an additional 5 credits if they visited a new blog that they haven't visited within the last 7 days, and stayed there for the full minute (therefore they'd earn 10 credits for that session).

I apologize for the long post, but those are just some thoughts I had to solve the root issue of attracting people to come to my site and decide for themselves if they like the content, rather then quickly scanning for the EC widget, dropping, and then running. Let me know if you want me to help clarify this idea at all with you guys...I'm a software developer and would be willing to help kick around some design ideas with you guys if you wanted.

Tim TheMoneyKings.com

As long as you're exploring options:

1. Remove the 75% tax from the ads.
2. Allow everyone to set their own ad price. Rankings would be determined by most cards dropped on each day.
3. Reward click-throughs from the ad with an additional credit, which should result in greater traffic to the advertiser's site.
4. Increase the number of cards showing in the inbox and provide some form of time/date stamp.
5. Sell placement in "Go Visit" lists in the Shop and reward people who complete a given list with bonus credits. New blogs are automatically included in X number of lists.

My vote is to continue to provide a credit for each card drop, reciprocative or not.

I agree this would set it up to not explore new blogs,but just set up your 300 for reciprocal drops. I agree if it aint broke dont fix it.

People will break into cliques like the high school lunch room. I think the biggest issues here is the amount of processing being required, what are the barriers that the system is running up against and how can all the great minds in this community solve it? It is easy to see that 50,000 blogs dropping cards is going to max out the system's resources. Unless tons of servers are thrown at it there will be worse issues than anything we have hit yet.

I think I am going to have to agree with Mogul. For the most part, this system is great, when it is running smooth, it awards everyone fairly. (Except those few exceptions...) It isn't really broken, per say.

I'm happy to say that my average visit length is already over 1 minute and has actually increased in the last few weeks, so that's a positive note.

I think, overall, right now at least, I would focus on making sure everything is running smoothly, that in itself will encourage more people to use the system to it's full potential. The glitches in the backend are what is slowing us down, not the "store front" as you might call it.

I just read the "entrecarder's" post and I agree with everything he said. I really like all of the ideas listed in the post. clap

@Money Kings: All this smacks of trying to make someone love you. In any relationship, if it clicks ... it clicks. You know it when you see it. Stop trying to force people to comment or read content that they are not "clicking" with. Do you want fake paid for love (kind of like prostitution) or do you want real readers? People drop by and if something catches their eye, they stay. Catch their eye. That being said, taste is relative as everyone knows and no one is going to be liked by everyone ... except the red monkey.

There was an excellent suggestion for ad prices in another thread ... it wasn't mine but it was great, I thought. Let the pricing stay the way it is and let blog onwers provide discounts or promos if they wish to. Say for a week or a day, they can offer 24% off or whatever. That would be a positive change I think.

@Dot Com Mogul - I disagree that my recommended approach is looking to make someone "love me".

I just got done browsing around the net, and found many sites giving people advice on how to drop their entrecards the fastest. Who cares how fast you can drop your EC's...the only benefit that has to me is if I can drop all 300 in 20 minutes then I'll be able to buy some ads on other sites.

My recommended strategy is to get people visiting new sites and honestly browsing through content, letting them decide if they like it or not. If the user likes it, maybe they'll subscribe via RSS, or maybe they'll come back another day for a read. The bottom line of my idea is to match people up with visiting and reading the sites they find informative or enjoyable, and giving people incentive to visit new sites so that the newcomers have an honest chance.

People have limited time, and most cannot realistically give all 300 sites per day (equivalent to their max drops) any sort of attention. I believe most just chain drop and their eyes are trained to look only for the EC widget and bypass everything else. If you can give all 300 attention, then I salute you since you're a unique individual in this world, or you have an extreme amount of disposable time.

Tim

No I don't give all 300 a lot of attention, but I don't just scan for the widget either. I also scan for the last post. If it doesn't grab me then I'm off to the widget. You are assuming that most people don't read anything or very little or explore new blogs. I don't think that's true. While I use Entrecard primarily as an ad service and have little interest in spending huge amounts of time reading blogs, I still read posts that interest me and I've read a lot of people who say the same thing. That being said, I still welcome chain droppers to my site. We both benefit and I thank you all for your time spent. I am certainly not going to read content for credits. I could be writing content for money instead and that would be a more productive way to spend my time, but I will read content that grabs my attention.

You know ... you said it yourself in your own blog.

Begin quote:

Here’s the money saving tip for you:

Chill!!!

We’re not saying that we hate social networking or Web 2.0 applications (we own a blog after all). What we’re saying is that if you’re (1) updating all of your entries on the aforementioned social networking sites every day, (2) adding captions and names to everyone in all 500 of your Facebook photos, (3) and/or changing your profile background every Thursday night at 8 “4eva”, then you’re:

Wasting a lot of time!

. . . and therefore money. /end quote

The same can be said for Entrecard. In my opinion, Entrecard's BIGGEST problem is that it is too time consuming. Anything that can remedy that, would be a plus in my book.

@Graham -- If you do that, then everyone goes out and grabs 150 of their "closest" Entrecard friends and only drops on them. Honestly, there's other things that are amiss. Don't think you're aiming your energy on the right thing/s. Why don't you let people just make up their own pricing and leave everything else the same and see how that goes? That seems like an experiment people can temporarily get behind.

Yeah, maybe you guys can have the owners of the blogs set the price OR do that based on "actual traffic" numbers, not Alexa numbers either since it's unreliable.

It seems like a lot of bigger bloggers do not like Entrecard simply because they don't get any value for their PR5 or PR6 blog off the bat.

BUT, you can still have another section where you can show the "top droppers" instead of having that with the ad prices.

How about this:

Entrecard Algorithm: It calculates your ad cost based 50% on your "actual" traffic AND 50% on the current pricing system.

That'd be fair for everyone since your high traffic blog can mean something while those with low traffic can also make up for by dropping a lot.

you gotta even the playing field, right now, it's only good for blogs with little to traffic less than 1,000.

Look at most of the blogs in Entrecard right now, most of them get less than 1,000 although some get a lot more.

It's gotta be more democratic and be fair to everyone, just like America.

Is an algorithm even necessary? Just have a part of your dash where you can adjust your advert price. Chow wants his advert price to be 1000 credits, then he should. If I want my advert price to be 120,000 then so be it.

BTW, I think that would be the closest to fair that you're going to find. Actually, I'm kind surprised this hasn't already been implemented.

@dot com mogul I applaud you for at least scanning the most recent post to see if it’s relevant and grabs your attention. I try to do this too and it ends up taking me forever to drop 300. But, I do enjoy getting up early, having a cup of coffee, and looking at the sites in my inbox and exploring their most recent posts so it isn’t too big of a deal.

The only reason I drop 300 a day is to try to stay somewhere near the top of the finance and investing category so that my card/widget gets a little more exposure and builds a little "brand recognition". I think many others are trying to do this too, and thus sites geared towards helping you drop as many cards as quickly as possibly are emerging. I do believe that we are in the minority when it comes to reading sites, and I do enjoy the EC community that I have the privilege of being in. Without EC I wouldn’t have found the Dot Com Whiz, or be enjoying Razzball, or be reading Kacie’s blog daily, or get a laugh everyday out of seeing Deimos’ purple face in my inbox, or visited many other notable sites which would take 2 pages itself to list…This is the experience I’d like to see EC help promote and build for bloggers out there.

Personally, the thing I like about my idea is it allows people with "average" amounts of time to still visit their clique of blogs that they read everyday anyways and get max credits doing something they already do. Then they can choose to view a few more new sites to see if anything grabs their attention and choose how much time to spend their giving it a little more honest review. Maybe they'll choose to replace one of the blogs in their clique with a new, more informative or enjoyable blog...Plus, they’ll earn credits while doing this, allowing them to advertise on other sites and potentially grab more visitors.

It'd be interesting to see some overall entrecard stats...If I were to guess, I'd say maybe 20% or less of the drops on my site are from people who spend more than 5 seconds on it. I’d bet the other 80% or more just drop and run. Now this could be because I have a bad site or am just plain boring, which is why I would find it interesting to benchmark my site’s EC visitor statistics against the rest of the EC community. I’d like to be able to compare my visitors, drop rates, and time spent on my site against blogs both in my niche, and outside of it.

I also think that once money is involved and EC itself allows people to buy and sell credits, then the service is going to get even worse with people spending way too much time dropping in order to just chase credits with the hopes of selling them. If that happens then eventually the EC economy may have too much supply of credits, driving down its price, and people will eventually just go away when they realize they can't make money on it. Personally, I think EC would be better off not trying to provide a monetary value to credits. However, I also understand the business aspect of it and realize that EC can make money off this if they treat it just like the stock market with a bid and an ask price, and they pocket the difference. This would allow Graham to maybe take a decent paycheck for all his hard work, and pay for what I imagine are sky high hosting costs.

With that being said, I'd prefer to see money not enter the equation, and instead have EC continue to create a community of individuals genuinely interested in reading other sites and networking with the writers at those sites.

How about an option like Blogreviewme.com.

The user has an option to choose between a price set based on algorithm (above), OR set his own price.

having just users' set price will make things chaotic and noone will use Entrecard as it's not based on anything but each users' opinion.

By having a standard and an option to set a price, it will work though.

You simply have to be fair to everyone otherwise people will feel left out and leave.

Da Bomb, wouldn't the market dictate a price? Why do you need the algorithm?

"having just users' set price will make things chaotic and noone will use Entrecard as it's not based on anything but each users' opinion."

Don't see how it's chaotic and it's not each user's opinion. Because if your opinion is wrong no one will advertise and the price will come down. The market dictates your advert price.

Well i am just making a term "algorithm" but that basically set the market price based on your drops, number of people dropping on you, and number of traffic your blog actually gets.

The number of traffic for the blog is right now missing and we are getting a lot of low-traffic websites. It's working as it is but it will never get those "high traffic" sites this way...

Yes, but you take a look at reviewme.com and see how many blogger set their price to $700 (the max) just to appear on top, this would cause spam by itself, that's why reviewme has an algorithm too based on alexa rankings, technorati rankings, etc...etc...

Here's a simple version of the Entrecard Algorithm that calculates your ad price:

# of drops on you + # of dropped on others + your blog traffic (every 100 unique visitors = 1 credit)

all the above divided by 3

well....that's just a start...

The thing I love about Entrecard is that you can discover other blogs that you wouldn't have come across other wise and people can discover yours. So I think we do need the credit on both ends.

Sure you'll get some people who just drop and run but I know that a lot of people do stop and read a lot of the content. I know because I'm currently running a contest that highlights some of the Entrecard blogs and people can identify the blogs fairly quickly.

With Entrecard I feel people are paying for the exposure on sites they choose to advertise with because they have some type of relationship with them, and not just because the site has a great Alexa rating. I don't select the sites I advertise on based on popularity. I choose based on the entire Entrecard experience.

@Money Kings. Your site isn't boring but nevertheless, not everyone will find it interesting or mine either. I agree that the money thing will just make it worse. I won't be buying or selling credits. I prefer the fake economy as it is. I can purchase ads and barter for other things with credits and that's the way I like it.

As for my comment about Entrecard taking up so much time, I think the biggest improvement would be really just a small one. You know that gold box that is around visited cards in your inbox? Why isn't it around all cards everywhere ... the categories and the campaign section so that we can instantly recognize which blogs we've already visited daily. That would be a timesaver and a big help.

@da bomb -- Well, a site that has a price of say 1200 credits but is empty wouldn't look too good, IMO. But I do understand where you're coming from.