Entrecard droppers on strike: no drops today

april 10 2009


To show the importance of droppers for the entrecard system.
To show entrecard droppers are no second rate entrecarders.
To show we want to have complete control over our own site.
To get equal respect for EC and money paid advertisers.
To prevent the decay of the Entrecard system.



The past months the entrecard bloggers have worked very hard to get and keep the system going.
They earned a maximum of 300 EC's a day for hours of visiting new sites, waiting to load the sites and the widgets and clicking well enough to have the system react.

With the EC's one could buy a place in one (1) widget with an unknown exposure rate. (Prices are mainly above the amount one earns in a day.)

With EC's members could buy small gifts, (like a ring, an avatar) or an internet service.

Most Entrecard members have met new people online, which is the true incentive of the system.

To pay for the costs of the system and to bring monetary gain to The Boss members were not asked for their opinion about how they wanted to contribute to this.

Instead an advertising system was introduced of advertisements from members and people outside the system, with prices so low, that the normal exchange of EC's for exposure fell almost to a standstill.

It was agreed members would keep full control over their widget, but dollars paid ads ran in front of EC paid ads that were approved even weeks before.
And outsider ads were not screened, not subjected to approval by the owners of the sites, so people were confronted with offending sites, sites that put the click-through system to a halt, and sites that were of such low quality that they downgraded the whole system.

In fact the site-owners lost control over their sites.
An approval system was introduced, so it seemed that problems were solved.
But a dollar paid ad was not added to the cue, but displayed immediately.

Many bloggers felt that respect was lost for EC paid advertisements and requested a cue system based on time of approval.
They didn't get it.

There is far more to say about what happened the past week, but I think that the main issue is that The Boss wants to monetise the system.
Site owners are told they'll get 75% of the advertisements income and The Boss will keep 25% to keep the system and himself running.

The way that 75% is brought back to the users of entrecard is not doing justice to those who keep the system running by dropping (= clicking the yellow part of the widget).
To keep people content the variables of an algorithm were published, but it only showed lack of insight in the whole situation.

Members offered to have a two sided widget on their sites, or two separate widgets, one for EC paid advertisements and one for dollar paid advertisements.
This would have solved quite some problems, but without any knowledge about how many people would accept and how many would reject this it was decided Entrecard members wouldn't want that.

All in all this led to the feeling that money is more important than human efforts to keep the system going, and that all decisions are made ad hoc (after the event) and are not put down in a business plan, which is required in many countries to start and run a business like this.
It's clear that Entrecard is not the invention of someone with enough respect for people.

Because we all feel it's a pity that the system goes down, we want to make a statement today.

We won't drop.

We won't use entrecard for clicking the EC paid and dollar paid advertisements, so it will become clear that the system doesn't work properly without normal entrecard droppers.

(I'll will repay those who were on the list for today at my site by displaying their square the rest of the month.)

Like I said, there's far more to the problem, but these are a few important elements.

Get your graphic here. More info ::here::.