Entrecard droppers part 2 Please Read!!!!

Hi Everyone,
I hope you are all doing well, I am doing good, Thank you to all of you who left
a comment on my last post. I just noticed one thing that alot of you mentioned
the paid add, I read this blog post from ec when it came in my email and I
interpreted it that they listened to us, and there are no longer paid adds, I
personally have not gotten any request for paid adds only other ec droppers
who use therir credits. I still had old paid add request on my dashboard
but I deleted them all and I never have recieved a paid request since.
Maybe some of you missed that or maybe I am misunderstanding this post,
but I believe the addmaster is using his own ec credits all over the place.
If any of you know different and Iam wrong please let me know.
Thanks for visiting my blog,
Take Care,
Janet :)
From the ec blog
We’re listening to you, and growing (again)
Very recently, you might remember us launching a paid ad system which let outside advertisers advertise across Entrecard widgets. Across the board, everyone was very clear and vocal that you didn’t like it one bit. So, after trying it out for a while and listening carefully to your feedback, we disabled the advertising system for all outside advertisers (though Entrecard members can still buy exposure for their “Entrecard” across the network).

It was pretty interesting to observe the communities reaction. At first when we announced the system, a number of people started leaving Entrecard. And it wasn’t really until we made the change, and disallowed all outside advertisers, that our growth numbers swung back to positive. And then it was like flipping a switch.

Overall, the experience was very humbling: for the first month ever, more people left Entrecard than joined. So, you can imagine how quickly I realized that we had made a mistake by letting outside advetisers in, and that the special, close-knit community we have here at Entrecard doesn’t want to let your run of the mill Internet advertiser into the building.

But now we’re back on track to add a few thousand bloggers this month, and continue growing, and with the new revenue that the Gambit system is generating, we’re cooking up some great stuff.
That’s all for me.
Cheers,
Graham

comment to this blog post on EC
SG Entrepreneur Says:
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:59 am

I think the new system where people can earn EC using the gambit system is great.

Btw, I don’t think the problem was necessarily just with the outsiders being advertisers but the fact that the space for EC paid ads was also suddenly cut in half. The advertiser lost out and the publisher also lost out (no one got paid for running those ads unlike in this gambit system). The system also had way too many bugs where paid ads would run regardless of whether someone had approved them or not and then seeing the same ad over and over again across the network made dropping impossible.

So I think you learned your lesson well- but hopefully, not just the one lesson you mentioned above. There were many other lessons … the main one being you don’t surprise your community with:

(1) Sudden changes
(2) Unstable changes (so many people gave up, myself included at one point, because things were not working as advertised)
(3) Changes that then kept changing (e.g.- all blogs had to move up their EC widget or risk termination, and then oh, it’s ok …)
(4) Moving deadlines

At the end of the day though, I’m glad that you brought it back to what EC should be.