After an extended conversation with my friend who hosts me, and some serious thought, I’ve decided that come October 5th, I will no longer be an active member of EntreCard. I stuck with it for over a year and got over 100,000 hits because of their service. It was a good idea in the beginning, but now it’s all about the All Mighty Dollar and I’m not about selling out. Especially if I can’t sell my own unique creations on my own space, I’m not going to allow others to resell my webspace.
I welcome everyone from EntreCard to still visit my site. I will faithfully drop until the eve of October 4th (for some reason my drop count resets at 11pm). I will continue to have the widget on my sites until all credit ADs have been shown. I assume that because I will no longer be dropping every night my credit count will not increase. I will decline any ADs placed after 11pm Central time today.
In lieu of EntreCard, I propose we do a blog crew or a WebRing of ex-EntreCard members where we actually surf the ring and comment on each other’s posts daily or weekly. Maybe we can do link exchanges. I suck at organising things like this, so I’ll just put the idea out there on the table and let the others who are in the same boat as I am do the work. I know I will lose many hits, backing away from EntreCard, but I cannot stand by a company that has lost insight to what blogging is originally about and risk a friendship that I have held dear in my heart since 1990. I just can’t ask Josh to allow me to break the rules when others cannot simply because he is my friend. When he told me he’d let me break the rules because I’m me, my heart broke. I felt like I was using my friend to stay a part of something that doesn’t care about me as a human. I also know that my content isn’t good enough to have daily visitors who aren’t dropping for that one, lousy EntreCard credit. That’s ok too. No hard feelings.
I love all the comments and emails I have gotten because of EntreCard. I know that I have touched many lives through my blog and it was because of EC that my words were read. I appreciate that. Maybe, someday, if EntreCard is no longer driven by money, I will return to them. I don’t condone or oppose anyone who chooses to stay with them. That is your decision, and it doesn’t affect me in anyway. I am leaving because my budget tells me to stay with my current host and my heart tells me that I shouldn’t ask a friend to break the rules for me because we’re friends. I believe in equality and this was my test in equality.
Good luck in whatever you choose to do. As for what will occupy my time that was once spent dropping cards? Well, I have ten Pharm 3 homework questions, nasty essay questions that can’t be answered with simple math or single-word answers that aren’t going to do themselves, so I’d better get on that! They’re due Wednesday!
Note: This entry repeats at my other blog.