It was a well thought out concept with great vision, but a bad start with constant outages, excuses and no plan in place for scalability. Entrecard just committed suicide yesterday by changing the rules of their forum.
The Entrecard forums are by far the best value this startup has to offer, and there not state-of-the-art, far from it! If they had VBulletin or PHPBB I would have a different opinion. The Entrecard forums (Marketing forum) no longer allows members to pay credits to other members to submit, comment or vote your blogs with any social network or bookmark.
This is not the only thing that ruined Entrecard. The so-called owner/CEO call him what you want is non-existent. You hardly hear anything exciting other than his announcements about the low cost of $50 per month for a 125×125 banner advertisement. It’s not worth $50 to advertise at Entrecard, as their traffic is dropping faster than a piano falling from a 10 story building.
Here are some facts:
I check the Alexa ranking every week and the activity in the Entrecard forums. You will only see the same 15 to 20 members each day submitting requests, selling credits, etc. Entrecard announced in their blog that they have 15 thousand members and growing. They may have 15 thousand members, but there are 14,980 members that no longer participate.
The value of an EC credit is dropping like Sirius Satellite stock.
Dead start-up walking!
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Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
That’s very interesting to know. As I am no longer using Entrecard. I’m sure I’m still counted as a member though.
I’ve been wondering how they were doing.
I agree about the forums dying but many people use it for the traffic it brings them from dropping. I don’t think that area is hurting at all. I am constantly seeing new people in my inbox and in the campaign area. And since only a small minority used the forums anyway, it probably wouldn’t hurt EC if they lost them anyway. I am a big dropper and I still get more traffic from EC than anywhere else. I don’t mind the dropping. I occasionally find a blog I enjoy and its something relaxing I can do when I watch TV.
EC was my number one referral traffic at 83%, now it’s only at 6% and today I have tripled my traffic without them.
They’re doing poorly as they are too disconnected from the community.
EC don’t have anymore to offer other then allowing me to network with other blogger like yourself frank. Other then that, they have fail in all respect of the card dropping and the buying advertising with Entrecredit. Why the hell would I advert with a site that gets 300 visits a day for over 1,000 EC!
I’ve been trying to tell people this, they don’t listen. Buy a stumble for 50ec each and with ath 1,000EC you can get about 1000 unique visits to your site. oh well, now i’m just roaming other forums like the one you made and the one at firestorm.
If everyone knows how to stumble exchange, they will all leave entrecard and do exchanges. The time you put into networking in exchanges you get a much higher return in investment then at EC dropping cards.
I went to Entrecard to read the announcement, and (surprise surprise) it’s not working again. :-(
When I first found Entrecard – late december, it brought in alot of real readers for a newbie, sort of put me on the map – but it did take alot of effort dropping, I think Frank & I hit it hard right about the same time.
I don’t have the time to continue dropping, I started picking only a few to blogs to comment on..etc.. I have purchased credits, to advertise for minimal costs, and check in now and again..I think anything needs dedication – and as anything, you get your “clicks” no pun intended. That tends to stifle growth when you can not penetrate that!
Great comment and could not have said it better!
Being too lazy to type twice, I just put my comments in a stumbleupon review of your post. At least I can kill 2 birds with one stone. LOL
No response from the owner of Entrecard. This confirms what I have been saying all along. Thank you!
Good post, and I honestly fail to see why they did that. The weak excuse of the “forum being too messy” really cannot be the reason, I assume there is underlying things.
Truly it lacks support and something new. Advertising is a waste of time and credits.
Hahah, I just had my account deleted.
Granted I had the widget on a page – not a quick drop page, a regular page – as my site is all a set colour scheme [blue/black] that I never break about bodybuilding, so it looked wierd on the sidebar.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe it was co-incidence I was complaining on their forum and then poof goes my account.
Entrecard is dead and there’s no way they can recover. The owner is the silent partner, to say the least.