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Yet Another EntreCard Post

In following trends here, I’m going to blog about EntreCard once again.
For, they’re now forcing paid ads on us. That wouldn’t be so bad, but their opt-out will cost you $50 per year. Whoa. If that was a one-time-fee, a permanent solution for their temporary insanity episodes, I’d go for it. Then when EntreCard would have these bi-polar episodes, I could just shrug and know it didn’t apply to me. $50 isn’t a small fee for some people. If it were, they probably wouldn’t be hosted on WordPress.com or blogspot.com. After all, my hosting for this site is $60 per year.
That brings me to why I am anti-paid ads.
About ten years ago, when I agreed to my hosting, I promised not to do paid-anything on it. My hosts (and I) believe that once someone starts accepting money to do something they once enjoyed or did for free, it no longer is good. It stops being done well and enjoyed and becomes a chore. I’m not on a reseller account, so I can’t have Google ads, or any pay-per-click ad on my blog. I can’t do PayPerPost (thank GOD–PayPerPost blogs seem forced. Unnatural). I can’t even have a PayPal button for cash donations on my site or peddle my handwriting fonts anymore. There’s a reason for that. My hosts (and I) believe that paid blogging is unnatural and seems forced. I agreed to this back in 2002 and I still uphold that attitude.
I wonder what makes EntreCard need this money so badly. Graham bought all the EntreCard domain extensions from GoDaddy.com two years ago for 2-4 years. The .biz is expiring next week. However, he owns 150 domains and the current EntreCard is hosted on Nettica.com, which going with GoDaddy proved to be a smart move because Nettica.com doesn’t have the best prices in the world. Dreamhost.com has a better pricing option and is a better host for small businesses trying to get off the ground.
So why the drama?
PageRank.
It has to be. Whenever EntreCard pisses off its massive user base, dozens of people blog about it, comment about it, and it usually happens around the time Google is crawling pages. It’s a great marketing scheme. Or it would be. If EntreCard was a small, personal site and not something that is supposed to be catering to the blogging community. EntreCard should be attempting to grow via word-of-mouth, not by PageRank. PageRank isn’t everything, but it does tend to grow when people blog positively about a site or service. All these changes, they’re free advertisement for EntreCard. Think about it. If they said they were going to kick off everyone on Blogspot, you’d better believe everyone on Blogspot would post about it. And who owns Blogspot now? Google. What blogs do Google crawl first now? Blogspot. Perfect marketing strategies. Except if they piss off the entire world, I don’t know who is going to continue to use their services.

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7 Comments »

  • Stacey (6 comments) said:

    You know, there are posts all over the place about this but yours is the first to explore the angle of the page rank. Very interesting…

    - 28 September 2009 at 7:31 am
  • Jamie (97 comments) said:

    I knew someone who used to blog about popular bloggers to the point where he was insulting them a great deal, and they’d finally blog about HIM, complete with a link to his site, and the note that people shouldn’t visit his page, btw. :D Google bombing is a new trend online these days. If enough people link to someone’s site with catch phrases, Google attaches that to it.

    - 28 September 2009 at 10:46 am
  • Margie (2 comments) said:

    I totally agree with you and think you’re onto something. Great job.
    Thanks.

    - 28 September 2009 at 11:51 am
  • Margie (2 comments) said:

    I totally agree with you and think you’re onto something. Great job.
    Thanks.

    - 28 September 2009 at 11:52 am
  • AuntieE (2 comments) said:

    I agree with you on the paid ads view. I have been asked several times why I don’t make money, they say you could make a lot. I just believe the same as your Host, it would because a chore to me. I do not know that much about Page rank, I learning:-). I decided a few months ago not to write anything about Entrecard on my blogs. I am not sure how long I will stay with them. A few of my blogs are not suitable for Some paid ads. so I will just have to see. Great Post you did,I think.

    - 28 September 2009 at 12:39 pm
  • Anonymous (1 comments) said:

    An interesting perspective. I see that you link to EntreCard with the text “forcing paid ads on us” and that Stacey talks about Googlebombing.
    EntreCard does have a page rank of 4, which isn’t all that great. When I’ve written about EntreCard, I usually don’t link to them at all.
    I have noted that their traffic is falling considerably according to QuantCast which I think is the best quantifying system out there right now.
    With that, I’m interested in where things go from here. I wrote a little bit about this in a blog post, EntreCard Updates, http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3753 and have been trying to gather additional information via a survey I’ve setup about blogger’s advertising preferences at http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3755
    I would love it if you and your readers could fill out the survey. I’ll write more about the results as more people participate.

    - 28 September 2009 at 12:44 pm
  • Willa (1 comments) said:

    EC Admin is getting so GREEDY! All their so-called option is all in favor of them getting money!

    - 28 September 2009 at 1:57 pm