The Collapse of Entrecard Traffic

Now that the dust has settled a bit after Entrecard introduced paid ads, what is the condition of what is left of the once successful traffic exchange? Many popular bloggers left EC completely.

In my opinion, the site may be more financially viable, but as a source of traffic for blogs (its original purpose) it has become all but useless. I maintain four blogs with Entrecard widgets, and used to receive about 50 visits a day to each through EC widgets. This varied somewhat, in relation to how many other EC sites I visited.

Now, I receive only 5-10 visits each day through Entrecard. Each of my blogs has tumbled to about 50% of its former value in EC credits. I have chosen not to display paid ads on two of them, and will accept some paid ads on the other two. The only blogs that seem to have retained their original value are some of the ones which were already in the top few spots in each category.

In all honestly, I have to admit that I, myself, am doing less surfing too. I am much more likely to come to dead ends now... recently one EC site has flooded the widgets with paid ads so that their "card" shows up on about every other blog. This only makes me want to never click on their ad.

While I met some of my most faithful readers and favorite bloggers through Entrecard surfing, unless a whole new generation of EC users signs on and discovers the pleasure of exploring new blogs by surfing widgets, you might as well join a few traffic exchange sites and just pay for page views.

In the past few days I've been trying to drop on more EC cards. Perhaps some other people will revive the practice as well.

Entrecard