Is Entrecard going the way of the Titanic? The lack of activity in the Entrecard Forums sure makes it seem that way. But is that the whole story? How about taking a look at the actual dropping numbers. Let’s go to the video tape!
Above is a chart of the activity of Entrecard users on my droplist who reciprocated drops for the previous two 30 day periods. Since I always drop on these people without fail, this creates a good indicator of who drops on me regardless of whatever method each person uses.
The stats:
October’s droplist had 250 members on it. November’s total is 238. Since members always come and go, a loss of 12 active members is hardly cause for alarm. But let’s look more closely at the activity of those 238 droppers. Those who dropped 11-30 cards a month greatly decreased. Those that dropped 2-10 increased sharply, going from 44 people to a total of 64. Those that dropped 0-1 were removed from my list, 12 in total. That shift of 32 people out of 250 is significant. Not only are members posting less often in the forums, they are dropping fewer cards. Sure, blame it on the economy or election doldrums, but I don’t see it that way.
Conclusion: Despite a downshift in activity and enthusiasm among Entrecard’s members, Entrecard is not finished as a network. It still accomplishes it’s main goal of bringing like minded bloggers together. As long as Entrecard delivers the traffic it won’t disappear. There are enough members who don’t care about who runs it, how it is run, or even if it becomes 100% spam. Eventually the last two mods will leave, spam will return, and the forums will be a ghost town. But as long as the servers continue to function, the service will exist.
That’s a big “IF”: Entrecard still has not properly monetized itself, and VC’s who once saw promise now see it as yesterdays news. Venture Capital has not dried up, just dried up for Entrecard. Eventually Graham Langdon may just sell it to break even, much like he did with the Million Dollar Wiki. His insistence of “being around for the new owners” is actually a deal breaker given his current unpopularity among his own users. Fixing the forums and adding a proper support network won’t bring back the old users. The OIO ads currently funding Entrecard are losing interest among advertisers. He’s down to 7 OIO advertisers now. Is $350 from OIO plus the $10 he probably makes from AdSense a month enough to cover server costs? Maybe.
Could Graham or new ownership turn things around? Short answer is “no”. It would require a lot of ideas, coding, volunteer help, and a wealth of new/returning users. Nobody I know that stopped dropping cards misses that aspect. So how can Entrecard appeal to the casual user? It can’t unless somebody major partners with it. And by major, I mean Google, Yahoo, or WordPress. It could save itself by allowing non-blogs to join, and then recruit the whole facebook/myspace crowd, but it may even be too late for that.
In other news: Read information about Turnip’s Drop List, download the droplist itself, or sign up for the free CMF DIRECT beta. That way if Entrecard ever disappears, people can still find your Entrecard image or blog.
Interesting analysis. I’d like to point out that you are drawing a conclusion based on data from your own results, not from overall results from Entrecard. It is possible that your droplist is being replaced by other similar lists that are becoming more popular. It is also possible that your site has lost some of its appeal and people are not dropping by for that reason.
I’m just pointing out a different perspective. I enjoy dropping by and reading what you have to say, so I’m not saying your blog has lost its appeal to me.
If the forums are dying it is likely due to the past couple months being on a high due to the possible sale of Entrecard, the changes to some policies, and the economy of Entrecard. Those things have pretty much settled now.
Paul: Your response is fair. That loss of 12 members includes all the new people I’ve added since posting the last list, so the actual number of longtime users leaving is greater than 12.
Since I do keep track of thse things, I know of no new list with any sort of popularity. As for my blogs popularity, numbers have never been higher. But that’s traffic from places other than entrecard.
Also, since when do people ever care about the quality of a blog when dropping cards? People will drop on blank pages if they load fast enough. Assuming you dropped on them first. I drop on everyone on my list, and my entire inbox when possible. So it’s not because I’m suddenly unpopular in the last 30 days.
Furthermore, If you had a way to check the top 24 “most popular” blogs in the campaign section 30 days ago, added up all their numbers, and then did the same exercise today, I’m sure you would see the total number of cards much lower.
I haven’t done all that research. I did look at the dropaholics.com site and have started dropping there to see how that goes. It is probably too new to have popularity, but I suspect it will do quite well considering dropping all those sites consistently almost guarantees a backlink from them. I’m also one of those new people to your list, so I’m curious to know how that helps me or if it does. With most of this there are just too many variables involved to isolate a single cause for any result.
I guess I am an exception in dropping. I will refuse to drop on some blogs due to update frequency, too much paid content, or various other reasons. A few will continue to drop on me anyway.
Your assertion is probably correct since I know you pay more attention to the dynamics of Entrecard than most people. I do pay attention to the Technology category though, at least the blogs ahead of me, and they have much higher numbers today than they did a month ago when I thought I might be able to make it into the top 3.
Wow Turnip your Brutal man
I think since it is so quite a better
and powerful analysis would be why are bloggers
under the impression they got stuff coming for free.The only thing wrong with Entrecard is bloggers and their lack of gratitude.
But that was a pretty bad ass and through look at the hopelessness of any site that is blogger supported.In the long run BLOGGERS will leave you.They want clicks but don’t click
Great post Stumbled.
Paul: That dropaholics site is interesting. I entered Turnipfopower.com in there and immediately shot up to #14 in the rankings. It’s based on your top dropper rss feed only. Since I’m the #1 top dropper for 238 people minimum, I should be #1 on that list by simply having a few of the people I drop on sign up. Maybe I’ll blog about it soon.
John: You touch on a few issues in your short comment! If a service is valuable, people will pay for it, support it, and defend it. But when the feeling is the owner doesn’t put in the same effort they are, they leave. Is it coincidence 3 mods left is a short period of time? More than a few bloggers have quit blogging because of the U.S. economy already. If more bloggers feel Entrecard is a waste of time, they will stop using it. Those who blog or drop cards from work, should they get laid off will also stop using it.
Also, subtract 2 more sites off the list who I found quit blogging and left entrecard since yesterday.
I agree. I have seen a decrease in drops. some long time users are not even reciprocating my drops. It is becoming harder to increase my traffic. this happened since entrecard changed the policy of selling credits. I think it decreased the motivation of a lot of bloggers to drop constantly. Money is a great motivator.
It all rather depends on whether your droplist is representative in any way. It can’t be representative of Entrecard as a whole because it’s hand-picked by you. They may well tend towards being older members, in which case they may merely reflect a “churning” of the membership which is inevitable with any organisation. Or it may reflect people who have achieved their main initial purpose in joining Entrecard, and are now taking a more relaxed approach to dropping. There may be a large proportion of friends of yours in the list, and so they may share your views and dissatisfaction. It may be the time of year.
I’ve noticed a large change in those that drop as well. I’ve been seeing a change in Entrecard overall, and since I’ve been around from the beginning I have history to judge off of. Things are slowing down overall with Entrecard, but it’s still bringing traffic in.
As for the forums, I never really post to the forums but I read them occasionally. I wouldn’t say that a decrease in forum activity would spell the end, as it’s just the decrease in those that are active in forum activities.
I agree with A. I don’t think that Entrecard is sinking at all. Quite the contrary, I think it is growing. However, there has been a big turnover in blogs. I see many blogs that weren’t here when I started 7 months ago, and many heavy users are gone now. The forums were just one small part of EC and the new regime might never have picked up on them. I quite enjoy discovering all of these new blogs which is why I never dropped from a list. I drop on them and these new people discover my blog. Isn’t the possibility of a new fan much better than just getting the same old traffic every day?
A.: My list is not handpicked by me. Quite the opposite. People pick my list and ask me to add their name to it. In return I drop on them every day of the month. While I do have some friends on the list, none of them have stopped dropping or blogging.
Hard to really tell much just by droppers. I’ve put most of the blogs I read through EC into my Follow widget on Blogger. So I don’t need to go through EC to read those which are no longer with EC. I drop on those that have a widget when I’m there.
Also, I stopped being a fanatical dropper ages ago. But, that doesn’t mean I’m not still with EC. I still buy ads about as often as I ever did before. But, I do have more EC credits to spend than I used to.
We all have limited time. We chose to spend it doing many different things, visiting sites through EntreCard, finding sites other ways, doing stuff offline, etc.
This month is National Novel Writing Month, and I was hoping to get a bit of novel writing done, but I’ve been too busy with other stuff and NaNoWriMo hasn’t progressed as much as I would like.
EntreCard has been at a lower priority than NaNoWriMo, so my dropping here has really fallen off. It has little to do with EntreCard and a lot to do with other time pressures.
I know others are doing NaNoWriMo as well, so I suspect that adds to things.
Nonetheless, the fact that people are finding other things to do more compelling than dropping EntreCards is not a good indicator for EC.
Did you forget to mention NaNoWriMo?
I still use the EC widget, but I am far from a consistent dropper. Heck, lately, I’m not even a consistent blogger. Anyways, when I started using EC there was a sense of community from many of the other bloggers using it. There were connections to be made and many people read what was written. Soon after I joined it became a race to see who could drop 300 a day and soon after I lost interest in dropping at all because those dropping on me didn’t want to read what I had to say anyways.
I think that EntreCard had succedded in networking bloggers more and this is a good goal wether they dropped the 300 cards per day or not.
I think Entrecard is taking water on like the Titanic and just a matter of time before it sinks. I think that many former Entrecard users are going over to Twitter could be some of the reason for getting less drops.
Madmouse: People are starting to realize that “free” isn’t really free. Blog real estate is a cost, time spent on the service is a cost, time wasted with spammers is a cost. It’s like working in the fields for 8 hours and then you are given a carrot to take home at the end of the day. Once every three months the owner of the farm shows up and talks about “great changes on the horizon”. Yet you see the top workers leave. You see the mods and admins of the farm leave. The farm claims to be just as productive as ever, yet you yourself witness fewer and fewer wagons full of crops being loaded at the end of the day. Meanwhile the gadflies and maggots are consuming much of that food and you have to shoo them away constantly. Has a virus made the other workers sick? One day a neighboring farm appears and has much more attractive landscape. Your farm owner suddenly appears and spends 8 hours shouting about how great your farm is, but then disappears again. But before he does, he passes by and you realize he has no clue who you are. Now you take a good look at the other farm workers. You see that the people around don’t even speak your language. Those that do speak your language are trying to sell you something. Luckily for you, you realize that piece of real estate you have been farming actually belongs to you, and you can take it wherever you want. You find a nice little community where others have been through the same troubles you have and are willing to give advice. Soon your realize you don’t need the old farm owner to meet others like yourself, it just required a little bit of time and effort to reach out. Something you never realized thanks to the daily drudgery of the farm.