Entrecard Changes

I was suddenly worried when I saw a post informing Entrecard (EC) members that changes were made. I thought about the EC contest I organized and how the contestants will take this recent round of changes.

Entrecard is the number one provider of traffic for my blogs and these changes are taken very seriously. The reason given by the EC management was that they had to make some significant changes in order to continue operating in the long-term. I am not sure yet what are the immediate impact these will make, but I was hoping that any negative effects are just temporary.

Anyway, the changes are the following:

1. Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: 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. We'll communicate more details nearer the time.

This will definitely hit the third parties hard, but EC management was hoping that, by taking the steps, they will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for their users and getting the revenue they need to pay the bills and expand the service.

If you have any comments or reaction to this latest move of Entrecard, leave a comment here: http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=555