Today I followed one of the suggestions for again checking the claimed rate of "no more than 15% of your widget impressions." (from EC blog post of Oct 6, 2009.)
You will see the results of some of my statistical experiments in previous posts. The suggestion has been made by two people that I should load 100 EC blogs while not logged in to Entrecard, and check the rate under those conditions.
Today I did just that. I used the following methods to load the blogs. I began by clicking on EC widgets in my own blogs where they led to other blogs. When the chain clicking options quickly bogged down due to running into EC ads I loaded other blogs either from bookmarked blogs that I like, or from Adgitize widgets which lead to blogs that are also in the EC system. It "killed" me to visit 100 sites without dropping a single card. I could have used the points! But I also think that this is important information to gather.
The results show that of 100 blogs loaded, 99 had EC widgets. That is much better than what I found using the EC toolbar. This is not surprising, since they were all loaded from active blogers that are purchasing EC and/or Adgitize ads.
Of the 100 blogs loaded, 20 ads were not purchased with EC credits. 14 were EC sponsored ads. There were 5 ads in the system at the time, one of which is an EC ad. Interestingly enough, only 2 of those 5 were shown to me in the 14 appearances. The remaining 6 were different ads which led to Entrecard itself.
It is a little bit difficult to assess this, and it also affects my previous conclusions somewhat, although the number of ads not purchased with EC credits is simply a fact. For one thing, if a blog has no ads in its queue, I think that an EC ad is still shown. My impression is that most of the 6 blogs with EC ads were known to me and should have had ads in their queue, it is possible they did not, and I did not double check that (by looking at the price for an ad with them). The reason this matters is that now that we have these sponsored (paid) ads, They should be the showing up at a rate of 15%- and in this set of 100, they do... 14/100 is within the margin of error. But if the EC ads which have a different graphic than the sponsored one are supposed to be part of the 15%, then the results are less in line with what EC has stated. That would be a 20% rate, which I would interpret as inconclusive and in need of more data gathering.
Have I Caught Entrecard Cheating?
| web ad income Nov 28 (4 blogs, 2 web sites, writing): Adsense $.20 Adgitize $.93 Project Wonderful $.02 Clixsense $.01 Neobux $.04 ______________________ Total: $1.20 |
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