Slave To The Internet

There seems to be something going on over at Entrecard.

Entrecard is an advertising program that many bloggers use to advertise their blog on other peoples blogs via a 125×125 banner exchange. Some people love it and some people hate it. Here at Slave To The Internet I used to use it but I wasnt getting too much traffic from it.

In recent days there has been some crazy things happening.

Firstly, Entrecard was up for sale at the popular webmaster site, SitePoint. However, after a few days the auction was pulled down by Graham (the owner) of Entrecard. Graham gave no reason for stopping the sale.

Then, today, I get an email from Entrecard stating a whole heap of changes to the Terms and Conditions.

Here is a copy of the changes outlined in the email.

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.

None of them really effect me, but Im sure there will be some bloggers who will not be impressed with the changes. Probably the biggest one will be that users can no longer sell the credits they have earned.

I guess it just a matter of time to see the impact to Entrecard, but interesting time lie ahead.