In connection to yesterday’s post, I’d like to say that shortly after I made the post, I commented on Entrecard’s entry about the forced paid ADs. It’s been over 24 hours and my comment was not approved. I didn’t get nasty, I just put in a different perspective: I wouldn’t mind paying the $50 if it was a permanent solution to their bouts of temporary insanity. And I was serious. If it meant that I didn’t have to worry about what ADs they were taking in, or what people were essentially buying space off of my space that I am not in a reseller agreement with, I’d gladly open up PayPal or drive down to the store to purchase a money order right this instant and give them the money. But if I’m going to have to do it again next year? No thanks. Not worth it.
However, since I’m not deemed “worthy” enough to have a stupid comment appear on their site (again, their choice), I won’t pay jack to them now. Even if they offered me 100% of my profits of paid ADs.
There is a good argument in the comments there that I would love to participate in, but I seem to be banned and I can’t get a new IP from my WiFi station and I refuse to do it from my school (people who ban IPs are the type who tend to whine to Universities and businesses that said person was banned from their home IP because they offered the ‘victim’ naughty pictures of little children). The argument that what EntreCard is doing isn’t free on their part. No kidding. Rackspace isn’t free. Essentially, what we’re doing when we have the code on our sites is stealing their bandwidth because we’re hotlinking the java script from our blogs. I load about 600 blogs on EC per day. I get about 300 hits per day. That’s nearly 1000 hits that I am responsible for. Imagine all the users loading sites. EntreCard must get about 1000 hits per minute. And that, my friends, isn’t cheap.
On the other hand, this is something EntreCard should have been able to foresee in the future. Back in the early days of blogging, many people boosted their PageRank and plumped their hits with RingSurf and WebRing. Again, free services that we mooched the java script source from. But I could go to either of those sites now and see that they’re still free, even though the fad of belonging to the Webloggers’ WebRing and the Blogs By Women WebRing is not the ‘in’ thing to display on your blog’s front page anymore.
So why stay at EntreCard? Clearly I’ve been sent to the corner (Hey Turnip! Thanks for keeping the quiet room warm for me!!) and I’m on thin ice. I stay with them because I need the audience. How many people would regularly visit my blog without the aid of that little widget? I tried the Adgetize, but I just don’t get it and I can’t get the code to show up here on my site anyway. So until the next fad in getting hits and exposure on my blog comes up, I’m stuck with EC.
I was also very serious about paying the one time fee of $50 to permanently ease my mind about ADs. See, back in 2003 I paid $100 to the place that hosts my journal so I could have all the paid features and not have to worry about losing my account (other than through suspension). Sure enough, three years later, they put ADs on all the basic accounts. Then they made Plus accounts that had ADs on them. With a permanent account, as long as I am logged in, I will never see these ADs. Last year, my husband got a permanent account for $175. He didn’t mind paying that price at all. So yes, I’d have really go fourth and sent EC the money, but they didn’t want to hear the voice of reason.