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Today was the day they rolled out the new ad pricing matrix at EntreCard. It’s been utter chaos all day with people trying to understand the new pricing system.

The Algorithm

It’s an exponential algorithm that’s creating some really high priced ads throughout the system. It works like this…

If you had no ads in queue last night, your ad price this morning was 2ec (regardless of what it was under the old system of pricing). When you accepted your first ad, your price doubled and became 4. When you accepted your third ad, your price became 8 (2*2*2). When you accepted your fourth ad, it became 16, fifth ad = 32, sixth ad =64, seventh ad = 128, fourth ad =256 and so forth. The limit of 10 ads in queue was removed, so conceivably, someone could have a hundred ads (or more) in queue.

Supposedly, in the morning all prices will halve, so if you went to bed tonight worth 65,536 you’ll wake up in the morning “only” worth 32,768, or like me who’s currently worth 1,024, I’ll be 512 tomorrow.

All this sounds exciting for popular sites where people queue up regularly to purchase ads on your site, but for the little guy or the newcomer it’s not such a sweet deal. He or she will have to wait until several ads have run (probably close to a weeks worth) before having enough ec’s bankrolled to buy any but the dirt cheap ads. And, as always most of those are going to be on new, or not the greatest spots in the universe to advertise. The whole point in advertising is to drive traffic to your site, but if the site running your ad has little or no traffic itself, you’re not going to receive much return on your investment.

Some things haven’t changed

Still in place is the 75% “tax” so you only realize 1/4 of that ad revenue when the ad runs. Also still in place is the 300 maximum per user/600 maximum per IP limits on dropping, so unless you’re one of those who gets a full reciprocation on drops, you’ll only realize a maximum of 600 ecs per day from drops/reciprocation. When ad prices on popular sites are over 1000 ec’s, it’s going to be hard to afford to buy ads on good sites, making it harder still to drive good traffic your way.

New logic in ad campaigns will have to be developed

At least by me, so as to get the most out of my earnings.

While ec’s are going to be available on the “market”, I refuse to purchase them with hard-earned cash. If I can’t earn them through the normal channels, then EntreCard becomes a waste of my time. If the only way to get my ad on a good site is to pay out hard cash, then I’ll be doing it through some other method than EntreCard.

For me, this new pricing feels like bait and switch.

I joined EntreCard because it offered a fresh means of social interaction that was only going to cost me a bit of my time. I put that time into it and rose to the top of my category which has nearly 100 members in it and I’ve been very happy with the rewards of that labor. Now, it seems that in order to keep my “brand” out there, I’m going to have to spend money to do so. I find that I deeply resent that.

Holding Ad Price Steady

There is a way to hold your ad price steady. That’s to hold off approving ads until the end of the day. Your price will remain at the level it started at that morning and those people requesting ads will all be able to purchase them at that morning level until you begin approving them. Then anyone who hasn’t already requested an ad will see the higher price. Obviously, if you’re at the 2ec level, you won’t want to do that, but if you’re like me and at the 512 level, I DO want to do that as it’s important to me to have advertisers who can afford my ads.

Waiting for the dust to settle

I’ll stick around for a bit to see how the dust settles, but I’m very skeptical of it settling down to a level where I feel like I’m still getting the return (being able to advertise on sites where I knew my ad would be seen and possibly clicked) on my hard work (dropping cards, participating in the forums, selling in the shops). From what I’m reading in the forums, I’m not alone in those feelings.

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