For long, Entrecard’s been plague by a whole lot of problems relating to over-inflated ad prices. It’s good to know they responded, but revising the ad system to go by the number of ads in the queue? That has to be one of the most absurd, or greatest moves made by Entrecard.
What’s good about the ad pricing changes
As the cost of an ad is now 2^(how many ads you have), ads on Entrecard can have the following ad prices: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. The good news — you can buy an ad out of a popular spot, provided if you are quick enough.
In addition, this change now rightly tells whose ad is more valuable, since popular sites tend to have ads that are highly-priced.
What’s horridly wrong
Entrecard’s move is going to mess with the entire Entrecredits economy. First off, people don’t feel the need to keep dropping cards, since they could easily snag off hundreds of ads in a day’s work. So, lesser drops means less activity on Entrecard. Sure, there will be more people buying ads, but this action severely devalues the Entrecard currency. In addition, people are now going to wait for everyone’s ad prices to fall to extremely low levels before buying.
The ad prices are also subjected to constant fluctuations. Since the ad price is directly influenced by how many ad spots that were taken, your ad price will decrease by half its original value the next day. What this means: Your Entrecard rank will plummet to the ground. If you are lucky, you’ll have someone buying your ad, and your site should stay at the top. In the past, while the Entrecard credit system has its flaws, it is a pretty good indicator of how active the owner is, and how popular a site is. Take that out and you are left with a simple system that is prone to being gamed — all it takes is for you to get 1024 Entrecard credits and you’ll be able to promote your site to the top of the ladder. Why bother paying 1024 for an ad, when instead you push your site to the top on Entrecard (a more heavily trafficked site) with the help of a friend?
Due to the changes in the pricing structure, Entrecard had to remove several items from the campaign page, such as “new”. This means that new Entrecarders will have trouble getting afloat in Entrecard at all, since there will be no one who would be willing to buy more than 4 ads on the site.
The pricing change has greatly affected the ladder. Your ranking in the ladder is influenced by:
1) Your ad price (only 10 possible prices)
2) A random factor
Due to the price change, the Entrecard community can be said to be divided further into the following groups:
–The insanely priced ones (512‑1024 EC)
–Moderate (64–256 EC)
–The extremely lowly priced (2–32 EC)
Earlier any Entrecard that was priced over 400 Entrecard credits is called insane. Now, thanks to the new system, a normal user can never have an ad queue that is full.
