The Entrecarder

When I opened my first Entrecard account at the end of last month I didn't have many options as to where to pay to place my Entrecard. No Entrecredits, no real clue as to what to try. After a week or so I had enough ECs to try out placing ads and the results were less than spectacular. I just kept buying ads, usually bottom fishing, but occasionally risking a larger amount on a site that seemed to be popular. Due to the lag between joining the ad queue and the date the ad actually runs, I wasn't really paying attention to the Advert Clicks chart on my Statistics page...at least until January 16th, when I received 229 clicks (and 194 cards dropped.) That represented almost a 10x increase in activity! How did THAT (a tenfold increase) happen? Two reasons: Yimto (103) and Wildclips (98). I paid Yimto 263 credits for the ad and Wildclips cost 99. I was further fortunate in that it just so happened that the ad on my site was for another of my Entrecard accounts and I got 140 click throughs as a bonus.

I got lucky. I got lucky because I don't control when my ads will run on another Entrecarder's site. In this case I was the beneficiary of running two ads on active sites that boosted my numbers and has resulted in my being on the Most Popular page, in the 24th position (right ahead of some guy named Chow), with an ad cost of 248. Absurd! Ridiculous! And the reason that Entrecard is changing the system. And now that I'm playing with the big boys (and girls) here on Entrecard's Most Popular page, some of them are placing their Entrecard on my site. Which is a good thing...because tomorrow my ad price is going to take a dive by about 100 credits. The good news is that I'm still buying ads on sites that are active and have high traffic in the hopes of another lucky day.

So the strategy? Save up your ECs and buy your way onto a Entrecarder's site who gets lots of EC traffic. What? That's a problem? You have the credits to spend, but their spots are always full?

Some of the wilier members of the Entrecard community have written scripts that will check for ad openings. I'm not a programmer and I haven't pursued that avenue, but it did occur to me that ads start running at the same time each day, depending on when one's first ad ran. (Unless you let your ad queue go empty and restart.) That means that John Chows ads are going to expire at the same time every day and that possibly he will have an available spot (for about .25 seconds). A list could be compiled of all the popular ad expiration times and then everyone could fight over them. :-) However, I believe the system is designed to allow for more ad requests than there are current openings, which accounts in part for the variances in the max number of days before the ad will run. (Someone please correct me if I've got any of this wrong.) When the total number of ad requests maxes out is when we get the "Ad queue full" display instead of the "Spot full" message. Either way, if one is really motivated to put their Entrecard on a popular site, it would pay to try and figure out exactly when their ads expire.