Entrecard Archive

We’ve written about the issues at advertising exchange Entrecard several times over the past year. Now it appears that another advertising exchange is also suffering some issues. Spottt launched at the Techcrunch40 conference back in 2007.  We reviewed Spottt on their public launch and noted that they have a cute doggg as their mascot. The Spottt service is a Web 2.0 version of the LinkExchange concept from the mid-90s.

We’ve been unable to access the service for more than 24 hours and from some conversations this morning, it appears that the service has been down for a longer period of time. It seems that even more than a year ago many Spottt publishers were wondering if anyone was still using the service.

Most of the ads we saw running in the Spottt network looked pretty amateur and would probably never run on larger blogs. The interesting thing about the Spottt code is that if you have Javascript, it degrades nicely and nothing is displayed. If you aren’t running Javascript, you always see the same Spottt house ad but clicking takes you to a blank page.

Let’s hope that the doggie is just taking an extended rest.

Blog ad sharing network Entrecard has announced that the service has been acquired by Los Angeles-based Ziprunner. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been released although I am unable to find any information online about ZipRunner. If you have any info on ZipRunner, please leave the links in the comments.

Founder Graham Langdon will remain on as an advisor to Entrecard. Graham notes regarding the sale, “Whether you love or hate the decisions I’ve made for Entrecard in the past, I always did the best I could to move the company forward given the resources I had, and I always had the best interest of the members in mind. Now, with new management and ownership stepping in, I urge anyone who has left the service to give it another chance, and I urge those who have been loyal members for days, weeks, months, or years to look forward to a brighter future, a reliable and stable service, and great new features and strategic direction.”

Last September Entrecard went up for sale but Graham decided to continue running the service. Additional commentary on the acquisition: 3arn, beginning blogger and dropit2.

Last December I posted the results of an ad campaign I ran on Facebook. I should change the ran to running because the campaign is still going although I haven’t seen a visitor from the ad to my startup (not CN) in forever. Today I’d like to share the results of an ad campaign I ran on Entrecard, also for my startup.

I reported on the launch of Entrecard’s ad program back in March and figured I would take it for a spin. You can purchase advertising starting at $25 in either CPC or CPM format. You upload a banner sized in the typical blog format of 125×125. From there you select a category — I selected the business category. There’s no targeting past the category selection. The ad went live about 24 hours later.

I’ve posted the results chart below directly from the Entrecard site. Here are the stats for my $25 ad purchase purchased under the 30 cents CPM option:

• 87982 impressions
• 550 clicks
• 0.0063 clickthru rate
• total orders = 0

The campaign resulted in zero total orders – I can use this metric because my startup charges a fee and isn’t based on pageviews like a blog might be. The interesting part that’s not computed at this point is how many of the 550 visitors have I at least opened the door to — meaning they will come back and order at a later date or share my service with someone else who will.

During the campaign Entrecard raised their baseline ad prices – doubling the CPM price from 30 cents to 60 cents. What’s interesting is that they doubled my balance at the time of the price change – a very classy move – so for this campaign the price increase didn’t affect the overall stats.

From my perspective, Entrecard ads seem very similar to buying ads on StumbleUpon using their Sponsored Stumbles program. Entrecard ads are less expensive than Sponsored Stumbles although the StumbleUpon program can lead to additional unpaid traffic via users who hit the "thumbs up" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Of course note that with any ad program there are many factors to consider. My service is a completely paid service – perhaps a free service would work better for the Entrecard publishers and visitors. My suggestion with any ad network you are considering using is to run a small test similar to the one in this example. This gives you a chance to see if the publisher traffic is a good match for your product or service. 

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.

Yesterday the company announced that they will launch a CPM-based ad network which sits on top of the ad sharing network currently in place.

Here are the bullet points from the Entrecard announcement:

In a week, we’re launching an ad network where anyone can advertise through Entrecard widgets for CPM rates. This can be run of network advertising, or targeted by category. We are making available 50% of our inventory, or approximately 40 million monthly impressions.

With the money we make, we are going to buy credits back from you. You will be allowed to sell credits via your dashboard, and we will devote 75% of daily sales to buying credits back.

The economy will no longer be in a state of inflation, but rather in deflation which means your credits will gradually start becoming more valuable.

For all this to work, we must institute an above-the-fold rule, which goes into effect in a weeks.

There are 125+ comments on the post from Entrecard users. Many are upset with the new ad network launch because they won’t be able to approve or decline ads in the same way as they can currently. Entrecard founder Graham Langdon notes that they need to make money as a company and knows some users may leave over the launch. I do see a lot of positive comments welcoming the launch as well. Publishers will also be able to cash-out for the first time.

Back in September Entrecard went up for sale but the founder decided to keep the service and has continued to grow their userbase since.

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. Last week Entrecard founder Graham Langdon posted a lengthy entry about selling the site and provided a link to an auction on Sitepoint. Two days later Langdon noted that the service was no longer for sale. Langdon apparently spoke with numerous potential buyers and decided that keeping it himself and fixing it would be a better move. TheNextWeb blog has a good overview of the entire sell/no sell transaction.

This is different than JustHackIt which went from Techcrunch to sold for pence on Sitepoint less than 24 hours later.

Today Entrecard has announced a partnership with OIOpublisher which will allow Entrecard users to pay for any type of ads through OIOpublisher. Basically this means that credits you earn on Entrecard can now be used to purchase ads on the OIOpublisher network in other sizes besides the standard blog size of 125×125 pixels. The interesting part of this new arrangement is that it requires Entrecard publishers to purchase the OIOpublisher software which is $30. So far Entrecard users aren’t thrilled with having to purchase this software to use their credits on the system.

I wonder what happened to Entrecard competitor and Techcrunch40 finalist Spottt. They publicly launched back in February but we haven’t heard anything from them since and their blog is down.

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".