I hate to make another post about Entrecard, but enough is happening there that I feel it justified. While browsing around recently I came across an article by impNERD about the problems with Entrecard. He has another post on the subject which describes many of the problems facing the community. In my opinion he is spot on with some of the problems identified, although I do not visit the Entrecard forums frequently enough to understand all the dissent that it sounds like there must be. Some of my suggestions are below.
The problem is that Entrecard has become little more than a traffic generating site with the added benefit of getting some loyalty out of people above and beyond what most blog aggregators have. If the system is broken, and it is supposed to be more than a traffic generator, then it is broken enough that a credit wipe would not fix it. People who drop 300 cards per day would simply amass an EC fortune again and those who don’t would continue to be too poor to afford the ineffective advertising. Ineffective because many member blogs receive the vast majority of their traffic through Entrecard alone. I can advertise on several sites in any given day, but I always have more outgoing clicks than incoming ones. Some sites clearly manufacture their incoming links to me as well, so that number is inflated. A credit wipe may be necessary, but a new system would have to already be in place before doing so because the current problems would just reappear.
It has also been said that the EC (Entrecard Credit) has too little value. One sure way to give EC value is to allow people to make money with them, but I understand that is no longer allowed. Another way would be to sell outside advertising through the widget and profit share to the blogging network based on the current cost of advertising value or by the user trading in credits for profit share. Put user’s blog advertisements in rotation with commercial ads. For that to work there would be two types of currency in play. EC and Cash. The conversion rate between the two could be continually adjusted based on the economy. CMF Ads is doing something similar with half of that idea, although they are young and will probably take a while to become large enough to attract significant advertising revenue. They are doing the right thing by managing their growth on high quality high traffic blogs, something that Entrecard should to some extent try to implement.
The other major problem I see is that some higher ranked EC member blogs are so bad that they probably get very little non-Entrecard traffic. Such blogs only perpetuate the idea that EC is nothing more than a traffic exchange.
I don’t want this to sound like I’m negative on Entrecard. It has many positive sides, and the traffic is night and day better than any traffic generator I have seen. I think a few policy tweaks would make all the difference. My list of suggestions is as follows:
1. Fix the blog rankings.
Receiving more drops than the next blog is no way to rank a blog. People drop cards on other blogs for many different reasons: Someone manages to get high on a drop list of reciprocating droppers. Someone offers no real content, but plenty of contests or other incentives. The rich get richer problem where people drop only on the most popular blogs which in turn only makes them more popular. Some blogs put the EC so high up it preceeds their content – they might prefer quick drops to real readers. The whole “U Drop I Follow” movement. There are several people who drop regularly on me that I refuse to reciprocate with due to their stale or spammy blogs. “U Drop I Follow” implies that the reciprocation is more important than whatever you might have to say.
Blog rankings should be a function of drops, post regularity and quality, comment quality, non-entrecard traffic, a randomness factor so that different blogs are featured, and EC community peer input or ranking.
2. Make advertising worth something.
How about pay per click advertising. Good idea I think, but the fake click problem needs to be fixed first. One blog in particular was responsible for sending 60 clicks my way in a single day. I did a little looking into the server logs and the majority of those clicks were from the same IP address. Advertising costs should be prorated based on unique click throughs, the sending site’s popularity, and its organic traffic, not its EC traffic.
Another possiblity is competitive bidding such as ProjectWonderful. What I like about Entrecard’s current system is that little blogs can advertise on big blogs because people can only have one advertisement in a blogger’s queue at a time.
3. Punish blogers who don’t post.
Or reward more highly those who do post regularly. Entrecard is designed in such a way that people need to visit the same blog with a reciprocating dropper every day in order to ensure they maximize their drop efforts. Any more than three days between posting and I get disgusted with your site. It’s too easy to focus on dropping rather than reading people’s opinion, and that’s not just bad for me, but also for the blogger. Presumably they want me as a daily reader or they wouldn’t drop on me every day. Why not give me something new every day to read. There are dozens of ways this could be implemented, and it would be a simple fix.
I have various ideas about how to fix that. For example, a voting system could be used to award EC to good posts. Or a blogger could only get credit for drops on other sites if they and/or the site they were dropping on had a post that was less than 3 (or pick a different number) days old.
4. 300 cards is way too many to drop.
How about 100 credit paying drops per day or less, and no credits for dropping on the same blog more than once in any week long period. That would encourage people to look at different blogs, and give blogs lower down the popularity list more of a chance. It would also give people who have day jobs a chance to compete with those who blog, or splog, for a living. Free drops beyond 100 and on blogs visited more frequently than once a week could encourage the social networking side of Entrecard but help the economy. There should be no upper limit on non-paying drops.
This would have a side effect of improving traffic quality for member sites. I’d rather have 700 unique visitors who visited once every week and actually read my content because they didn’t have to rush off to make all their drops than 300 unique visitors who visited every day only because they had to drop. Traffic volume might go down some, but quality would improve.
5. I don’t have all the answers, and neither does anyone else.
I have seen this sentiment by many people, but there are others who do think they have all the answers. They don’t. Everything on the Internet is a moving target. Things that work one day will need to be changed later on. The service has to be open to change. A beta site separate from the production site could allow interested parties to test different theories without impacting the community at large.
The owner of EC gets this concept. I’ve seen posts asking for suggestions, and I have seen him comment on other people’s suggestions. I think a beta site would allow him to move rapidly on concepts and test out different economic scenarios. After all, we have a very real-world example of how fragile economies can be, and if there was some way to model the world economy in a small scale beta world just by carrying around a beta tester cookie that could be turned off and on, then maybe we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess.
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I think fixing rank is most important. People are getting used to promoting Entrecard instead of blogs. Result is awful blogs without updates for a month easily floating to top of category.
Mass-drops are pretty sick too. I was outright flamed few times for saying that spending that much time every day for the sake of getting virtual credits is better spent on something like writing posts.
That’s crazy! What kind of person would flame you for spending more time with content than some kind of virtual currency? Bloggers have been successful without Entrecard, so why spend more time with Entrecard than with the blog? Maybe someone exists like this, but right now I don’t know anyone who has amassed a real fortune just using Entrecard.
I also agreed that the ranking system of Entrecard needs modification. It should not be as simple as the number of drops a site get. Maybe a mixture of votes, drops, and how regular a site is update. An economy that is not manage well enough will result in the inflation of the currency. That is exactly what happen to EC. (Some people are just too rich)
Regarding the mass dropping, I recently became one of the 300 drops/day dropper. But I still put in a lot of effort in my blog content. I valued quality content much more over virtual currency. The reason why I do 300 drops per day is I wanted to get more exposure to my site. And in my opinion, the real challenge in Entrecard for me is to convert these droppers into loyal readers.
Mass dropping is not always bad, it just depends on how you use the system. Despite that I’m doing 300 drops daily, I do not just drop and run. I will keep a list of the sites I like & is updated regularly, and I will visit those sites and drop back on them regularly. Another percentage of sites I dropped to is the “top droppers” and “recent droppers” on others site. I see this as a way to welcome new visitors to my site. I then return the remaining drops to those new sites who dropped on me. In the process, I take note of their site design and content and learn from them as I go.
I agree that there is much more space for improvement in Entrecard. Like some really good content blogs which are hidden deep down the list with low popularity as you also mentioned. However, one thing that we need to note is it is really easy to note all the changes we want, but implementing it and altering the whole system is more complicated than we thought. Let’s give them some time. I do look forward for some good changes and hopefully it will make Entrecard a better place.
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I agree with you aswell on the ranking of blogs, I think there are various factors that should come into play and I would think some of the following would be beneficial
1. Age of last post, maybe deduct x points for each day that has past without a post
2. Organic visitors, members or not, ie count the number of unique visits to the blog (can be done via existing widget)
3. repeat visitors/droppers within x days only counted towards popularity once.
I am sure there are others that have crossed my mind in the past but can’t think of them at the moment.
I do think valuing the credits is harder than we imagine, but I agree something needs to be done, the fact ‘It has also been said that the EC (Entrecard Credit) has too little value. ‘ is one that I am not sure is always the case, to advertise on my this for example as I write this comment is 256EC’s, at the rate EC themselves have set that makes advertising here $1.54 a day yet advertising via projectwonderful.com is just $0.02 or $0.03 a day. This tells me that the EC’s are over valued but on the other hand, someone that spends say 2 hours/day dropping on 300 blogs is earning just $0.90 an hour based on the same EC rate and I for one would value my time far higher making EC’s under valued.
Greg
Gregs last blog post..Welcome to Our first direct advertiser
@Wystery
Thanks for your comment! I read your blog post about how you managed to get 300 return droppers, and it is good stuff. I plan to implement some of that. I look forward to the day when I can see 300 return drops. I also started keeping bookmarks of many blogs that I find interesting and will drop on them first. I’m preparing myself for when it will be impossible to return every drop dropped on me every day. So far I am keeping up with returning every drop.
@Greg
Item #2 would be very beneficial. I have a good example of an inequity between Entrecard rank and visitors. Joe Tech doesn’t get a huge number of return drops, but his traffic average is greater than mine. I know because I’ve done some projectwonderful ads on his site.
1000 ECs are only worth $6 when purchased from Entrecard. If it results from 1000 drops on your site then you are actually getting paid for traffic, so in effect Entrecard is paying me $6 to get 1000 page views. Not a bad deal. The 5000 credits that were in my account that I dropped on a contest as an experiment were worth 0 dollars to me because I couldn’t sell them, not that I would have. 2 hours/day dropping on 300 blogs is probably pretty accurate, however during that time I’m also learning stuff, writing comments, getting backlinks, and probably watching some TV. If I was doing it purely for credits then there is no way I would make that investment. I’d sign up to one of those 300 drops in 15 minutes things and be done with it.
What we all really want is high quality traffic, not ECs. So long as Entrecard delivers enough quality traffic to my blog, which they do, I’m satisfied with them. I’ve experimented with projectwonderful, and for 2-3 dollars I can get tens of thousands of banner impressions and at least a hundred or so visits. If I had my choice between buying 1000 ECs to spend on advertising or spending that $6 at projectwonderful, then projectwonderful would get my money because it would go further.
When Entrecard is half of someone’s blog traffic, then dropping for traffic seems worthwhile. If it were 25% or less they probably wouldn’t bother with it. I think that’s the problem we need to solve together, because we need to be able to retain those high end blogs that become successful.
Isn’t it funny how we all know a good blog when we see one? Yet somehow putting it into a mathematical formula never gets it right. Traffic alone means nothing. Neither do pagerank nor alexa. Even comments can be deceptive. I’d rather get 20 great comments adding to a discussion, than 50 “Nice Post” comments. In the end, it comes down to one thing. Do you leave thinking “great blog?” or don’t you?
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@Turnip
Right – as you said, the problem for the Entrecard admin or any site that has some kind of ranking structure built in is to turn that instantaneous calculation that we make in our heads into an algorithm. Thinking about it that way there is probably nothing they can do to make it completely fair or accurate.
As I think about this more I am thinking about how I go about blocking off sites that I don’t want to see anymore. I use OpenDNS and I actually blocked a few domain names because I have a bad habit of clicking on them and I don’t even want to see them again they were so bad. Maybe they could integrate that into Entrecard similar to the Friends list with a Blocked or “Enemy” list. I might be satisfied with the ranking if I could easily block and not see those sites that rarely updated or wrote garbage.
Integrating the number of friend/enemy flags a blog gets as a variable into the ranking is a potential option. Allowing users to rank sites or aggregating sezwho, etc, and add that ranking into the equation is another option to include some of the human factor. Either has the potential to become too arbitrary and vulnerable to abuse, however. Someone who is opinionated may be treated unfairly – for example political blogs. If they take a stand they are going to make roughly half of the people who would click through unhappy.
I agree with much of what has been said about Entrecard, however, this makes me feel like a hypocrite. EC has driven quite a bit of traffic to my blogs and while about 65% of it belongs to the drop-and-run crowd. I tend to be a drop-and-run visitor on sites that I have no interest in, but I’d like to reciprocate and get a credit while I do so.
Over the past few months, however, I have stopped trying to drop as much as possible (too time-consuming and not really worth it). I now drop first on the blogs I like to read and will comment on, then if time permits I visit my drops inbox. I have become more selective about my advertising and while I still will not pay more than what I think an ad is worth, I do spend more now on quality versus quantity.
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Very well thought post. I agree with you on some points. especially the incoming clicks through advertised entrecards is very low.
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It’s true that Entrecard could be improved. But hey if it’s free, i guess that’s all we can ask for.
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@Web-Betty
The drop-and-run is a fact of life in Entrecard. Unless a blog updates every single day, I’m going to drop and run on that site.
@Nihar
Thanks for the comment. I’m doing some experimenting with advertising and watching referrers and unique clicks. I will report on this eventually, but I have seen some sites that click through to me multiple times to make their blog look like it is sending me more traffic.
@John D
Yes, it is free and even if it cost a small monthly fee it would still be worth it for many people.
Although this may be a step into the right direction, I don’t see a reason for many of what has been suggested. Sure, if you let someone drop 60 cards and get 300 credits for it, it looks good from the outside. But once you think about it, it ends up hurting. If you like it or not many people rely on reciprocal dropping. So instead of 300 reciprocals they get 60. That doesn’t look as pretty, eh?
You could talk about adding blue/red/green stripes on cards in the forums all you want, but that isn’t going to help the economy. Go ahead and add in donations, but again, it won’t help the economy.