The Sewing Mom

First, let me start this post by stating right up front, I fully understand the need for those who run Entrecard to earn revenue to help pay for servers, hosting, etc. I also believe that there is room for the paid advertising  on EC, but the system as it’s currently operating, is not working (unless you’re paying to run an ad) and needs some healthy revamping. I support EC and it has been a completely free service (not counting the time I put into it on a daily basis) and has helped increase my traffic, helped me find new blogs that I love, and helped others find me.

That being said, I am very disappointed and frustrated at the new system. Many EC bloggers just like myself, spend hours per day investing time dropping their card on other blogs. I do know I could reduce the time simply by dropping and running, but I enjoy the blogs that I drop my card on and have a tendency to stop and read and many times comment on posts. With all of this, I drop 300 EC per day normally, and, prior to the introduction of the paid ads, I received between 300-400 drops back on my site each day. The paid ads have changed all of that.

You see, now, even though I have an ad, paid by EC credits, in the queue, an ad paid with $ will supersede that ad. In fact, yesterday, my unscientific experiment of refreshing my screen, resulted in my seeing the EC ad less than 17% of the time versus seeing the paid ads.  Mind you, I can’t even tell you what paid ad might possibly appear on my widget because the paid ads do not appear in my dashboard.  I don’t believe this is fair to the person who has spent the time dropping cards and earning credits to pay for advertising with EC credits and then lose a significant amount of impressions for their ad in my widget. EC promised that we would still receive a minimum of 50% impressions, that is not the case. Many have stopped purchasing ads with EC credits and many more have stopped dropping all together.

For these reasons, and perhaps because I think I need a break from EC, I am going to participate in the Entrecard Strike on April 10.

To show the importance of droppers for the entrecard system.
To show we’re no second rate entrecarders.
To show we want to have complete control over our own site.
To get equal respect for EC and money paid advertisers.
To prevent the decay of the system.

Again, I am not against EC accepting paid advertising, but I do believe there has got to be a better way. I am not interested in cashing in my credits for cash, although I know there are those members who are interested and that is fine. I would accept a widget with 2 spaces (vs. the one we currently use), allowing for both types of ads to run simultaneously.

I encourage participation and you can get your own graphic here .

Please note, while I won’t be dropping cards on April 10, I WILL still be visiting sites!