I haven't been using EntreCard much lately. I believe its glory days are over. I thought it was a great idea in the beginning. There was once a time when I met a lot of new people and got some decent traffic from EntreCard. Unfortunately, that didn't last very long. Now, EntreCard seems filled with spammy sites and people trying to abuse the system. It is too hard to weed through the junk to find anything of value or worth reading. In an effort to correct this, it appears that EntreCard has changed the rules (again) - which I thought they should have done a long time ago. Now, I fear it is too little too late.

The Decline of EntreCard

In the beginning, EntreCard was a good service. I thought the concept was great on a small scale, but questioned its viability as a long term, scalable model. Six months ago, I wrote a post explaining why I thought EntreCard was doomed. I thought that there were simply TOO MANY EntreCard credits getting created, which threatened the value of a single credit. Graham Langdon, EntreCard's founder, responded to my post explaining why their model will work for the long run. A few months later, they changed the rules to make blog advertising prices increase by a power of 2 for each person waiting to advertise on a site. Now, a few months later, they are changing the rules again. Clearly something is not working, and to anyone who has been using the service for a while, this has been quite obvious.

The New Rules

So here are the new rules, as delivered to the inbox of all EntreCard users a few minutes ago.

1. Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits
   
2. More pricing increments: Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising
   
3. Members are not allowed to sell credits: This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms.
   
4. Credit transfer limits: Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week. Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs.
   
5. Transfer tax: From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1).
   
6. Blogs cannot be unlinked: Once you link a blog, it's there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot.
   
7. No more coupons: You are no longer allowed to send coupons.
   
8. Shop closed: Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better. We'll communicate more details nearer the time.

According to EntreCard, the above changes are being made due to their declining financial situation. Their email continues to say:

We hope that, by taking the steps we have, we will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for our users and getting the revenue we need to pay the bills and expand the service.

The Only True Fix

These changes are clearly trying to make the value of an EntreCard credit more valuable. Why? So they can be sold to make the company money. As I mentioned earlier, I think these changes are too little too late. However, there is one thing that I think can save the declining service. Instead of using rules to affect the value of a credit, let the users decide how valuable a credit should be on a given site.  EntreCard should take a note from Digg and other successful social media sites that use community voting to decide on the popularity of blog. If EntreCard allowed the users to "vote" on the value of a blog, which in turn determined the price to advertise on that blog - irregardless of the number of "drops" that blog gets - I believe a lot of spammy, junky, blogs that are clogging up the service will be pushed to the backseat. Perhaps drops from blog owners with a High Rating become more valuable than from crappy blogs that are just trying to game the system. EntreCard needs to decouple the quality of the site with the act of "dropping cards". It is the only way to ensure that high quality content is being judged for that reason and that reason alone.

I am not trying to suggest a new business model for EntreCard. All I know is that, in my opinion, the biggest problem with EntreCard is the number of worthless, annoying sites that have flooded its system. If the service implemented some type of community approval and ratings system for the quality of the content, I believe the service would do much, much better.

What do you guys think? How many of you out there still like EntreCard the way it is? Would you enjoy it more if you able to intereact with higher quality blogs with better content?

Jeff

ps - EntreCard, feel free to send me a check for my consulting services.