SevenToTen - Blogging About Everything

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There are some significant changes in Entrecard which are supposedly good for the long term. These are listed below.

1. Buy credits for less

Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them at http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits

2. More pricing increments

Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising

3. Members are not allowed to sell credits

This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms.

4. Credit transfer limits

Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week.

Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs.

5. Transfer tax

From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1).

6. Blogs cannot be unlinked

Once you link a blog, it’s there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot.

7. No more coupons

You are no longer allowed to send coupons.

8. Shop closed

Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better.

I believe such changes are necessary to put Entrecard on a stronger footing. Servers need to be upgraded big time and hopefully, they get more funds from selling of credits and advertisements.

For the time being, independent credit sales or credit transfers among members are prohibited, thus members who advertise heavily have no choice but to click 300 sites per day or fork out the $6 for 1000 credits.

I wouldn’t mind spending more on Entrecard if the end result is higher quality traffic, comments, and subscribers and better serps.

Does this spell the end of a great community? Entrecard is up for sale as indicated on the Entrecard blog and sitepoint.com. Graham has previously indicated that Entrecard is not for sale, even to Google.

His vision for Entrecard is “so massive that it will take perhaps my entire professional life to achieve what I have set out to achieve with Entrecard.”

The reasons for giving up on Entrecard is that Graham has suffered immense losses, maxed out his credit cards and losing a multi-million dollar deal in the 11th hour. If this community is demoralized and on the decline, I guess it is hard to find any buyers.

Who want to spend a six-figure buying this site which burns up cash fast and the best members have deserted, leaving an empty shell or rather spammers? Graham owes all those who stick by Entrecard through all the broken promises, lack of support, downtime, a better explanation.

As one of the moderators Ben Barden said: “In all honesty I feel pretty let down by this. None of the mods knew anything about this before everyone else did, nor were we asked for views. We don’t know if a new owner would keep the current mods on board or not. The timing of this couldn’t be worse - we just signed up three new moderators. What message does it send to them?”

This was a surprise for the moderators as much as members. Bad timing and communication, Graham. With such a strong support team, Graham should persist and not throw in the towel so easily.

Graham’s response to Ben: “Ben, it’s not about the team. It’s about my credit card being maxed out and me about to be homeless with very very few options.”

Graham went on to say that he is only “exploring the possibility” -its still a long shot it will actually happen.”

A lot of bloggers depend on Entrecard as their main source of traffic, so if Entrecard collapses and all the Entrecard credits which are accumulated after months of hard work go to waste, it is really terrrible indeed.