April 20th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

Entrecard started life as a way for bloggers to show a 125×125 advert for their blog on other blogs. It was all powered by a points system with points being awarded for various actions (too many to list here). As with any freebie system there comes the time where the owners will want to start making money from it. Fair enough. Entrecard have played around with a few gimmicks and ideas in the past but have just recently released what I suspect was probably the overall aim of setting up Entrecard in the first place, a paid advertising network. With pay per click costs as low as 0.04 cents and pay per impression costs as low as 0.60 cents per thousand (both for subject targeted) I just had to give it a go. Somehow it’s left me a little bit dazed and confused, and here’s why.

For a start within 1 week of me getting my advert approved they decided to to double their rates. Whilst 0.04 cents PPC is cheap, 0.08 cents isn’t really. Not considering some of the keyword bids you can do with Adwords and the other various top level PPC networks. I don’t understand why they chose within days of launching the system to up their price, it seems it was a decision based entirely on demand – not on what the advertisers were getting in return. More on that later.

Jump forward one week and they decide to make another change, they are removing the PPC option They blame it on old ads blocking up spaces for new advertisers (WTF). In a matter of weeks, with all the changes having taken place what started of for me as a “worth a punt” 4 cents per click advertising deal has actually cost me 10 cents a click and growing. Depending on your vertical 10 cents a click is quite high. Of course this wouldn’t matter if as an advertiser the audience was a targeted one. I think anybody that has ever run the Entrecard widget on their blog knows exactly what’s coming next!

The traffic delivered via Entrecard is shit. Sorry, it’s my opinion, and as far as I’m concerned that traffic is junk. Whilst it’s (or was) beneficial in maybe getting a new blog out there and getting some traffic the traffic that arrives is only interested in 2 things, dropping their Entrecard for credits and getting of your blog ASAP. The paid adverts are simply blended in with the standard adverts so the chances are anybody clicking on your ad expects to arrive at a blog where they can drop their card and move on. In my experience with Entrecard the vast majority of people who click on the Entrecard widget are Entrecard users themselves. Combine that with a terrible CTR (as anybody who had used Entrecard will tell you) and you have a system that gives you bad traffic and not much of it. As an advertiser what I want is somebody clicking my advert because they are interested in what’s on the other end. It is a paid advertising network that doesn’t actually seem to offer much to the advertisers (except what was initially a very attractive, low PPC). Do they really expect that the people who will pay to advertise will be blog owners looking for traffic? I doubt it, if you pay for advertising you want some ROI, nice hard measurable ROI, that’s why I can’t understand Entrecard changing their pricing and removing the pay per click option so soon, there is no way they could have possibly had any idea of what ROI advertisers were getting from their system. I for one will not be bothering to use it again.

To be fair to Entrecard when they did double the prices they also doubled the deposits for early adopters like me so we didn’t lose out. They have also been quick to let advertisers know of changes to the system, it’s just unfortunate that they’ve made so many major changes so early. By not offering a bidding system, nor measuring click-through-rates (CTR) it’s got to be one of the most confusing advertising systems going. If Adwords has taught us anything over the years it’s that the market will find the right price for paid traffic, Entrecards system seems to be charge as high as they can until the advertiser demand disappears. I have a feeling that they’ll not have to wait long.

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Paul B