Entrecard Gets Serious About Quick Drop Pages

Entrecard is a blog ad sharing network. Basically you show banners for other sites and earn credits that let you "buy' banners on other sites. It's pretty popular in the SEO and making money blogger realm. John Cow has an indepth review of the service from earlier this year.

Yesterday Entrecard announced that they are deleting the accounts effective July 1st for those users who are running "quick drop pages." Entrecard explains, "Quick drop pages are single pages with your Entrecard widget, made to load quickly and display your widget and not much else. Many quick drop pages have just a widget, and maybe an ad or some other type of widget." Here's an example of a quick drop page.

Quick drop pages devalue our network as a whole, by motivating members to drop on the same, quick loading pages, en masse to gain credits quickly and efficiently. The company says they have a way to detect all Quick Drop pages and will purge all from the system.

The other company offering a similar service is Spottt. We reviewed Spottt on their launch and noted that they have a cute doggg for their mascot.  Whenever I see Spottt banners, the first load seems to have a Crunchgear ad every time. Subsequent loads offer other banners before returning to the Crunchgear ad. This was one of the concerns I raised on my initial review -- the ability for one (or a small set) publisher to control the initial ad on the majority of sites in the Spottt network. It looks like Entrecard deals with this by allowing publishers to control which ad slots they "buy".