The Entrecard Blog recently mentioned how Entrecard celebrated it’s one year anniversary.  Largely a fluff piece, it does make some interesting claims as well as hinting about what is to come.  As an Entrecard member since December 2007, a month after the launch, I’ve been here through most of these changes.  Let’s look at what is addressed in the article.

Fun with math:

Claimed: 5 million visits per month -  That’s probably true.  However, it’s a large number that becomes very small once examined.  5 million cards dropped a month is only 166666 per day.  In my Hardcore Entrecard Dropper Article, Phirate revealed that on average, 260 people per day drop 300 cards.  So multiple 260 x 300, and you get 78000.  Subtract 78000 from 166666 leaving you with 88,666 card dropped per day by non-hardcore Entrecard people. 

Just under half the daily total (78k out of 166k) are absolutely using Entrecard as a link exchange by dropping 300 cards.  Of the 88,666 drops not by people dropping 300 per day, how many blogs is that?  I have 5 in the system, and others have a similar amount.  Judging by the forums, a fair amount of users drop around 100 a day.  If you divide 88,666 by 100, you get 886 non hardcore users!  The true number of casual users is probably much higher, but nowhere near the 10k-20k Entrecard claims.  This is just number play to try and give that 5 milliion figure some perspective. (please don’t tell me how many cards you drop per day)

Claims made by others:

• “this has been done before”- No, not really.  It’s true other schemes to get bloggers to visit each other’s sites have come and gone.  Blog Explosion was similar, but fell apart despite having many great ideas.  Entrecard was unique in that it identified each user through the use of a 125×125 graphic.  The same image could then be used for gravatars and favicons, branding your image across the net.  Imitators have since tried to duplicate Entrecard’s popularity and failed.
• “this is just a traffic exchange”- It wasn’t in the beginning.  It took roughly 2 months for Entrecard to become a traffic exchange.  Before the creation of the inbox as we know it, you could only see the most recent people who had dropped cards on your site.  So unless you monitored Entrecard 24/7, you never returned every drop.  Once the inbox was installed, advertising on the Entrecard network lost all value to other members.  Soon everyone caught on and Entrecard became a traffic exchange.
• “this is a fad” – No more or less a fad than blogging itself.  People want readers, so they visit other blogs.  Is commenting on other blogs also just a fad?

Promises made moving into Year 2

• Rerelease the shop - Right now you have 4 choices of what to do with your credits.  Hoard them, give them away in contests, spend them on advertising, or advertise on OIO publishing blogs supporting EC advertising.   I got lucky being a shop merchant.  So few people looked at the old shop that I didn’t get killed selling t-shirts there.  But since I can’t convert the credits to cash, what is the advantage for any merchant to sell anything there?
• Buy and sell credits from your dashboard – As I mentioned above, you can’t attract real merchants without the ability to convert credits to cash.  The problem is stopping the influx of spammers and scripters to the system. 
• Moving contests to their own forum:  The Entrecard blog has been mismanaged from the start.  Running a blog by committee isn’t easy.  Without contests, I’d expect few if any posts.  As any regular Entrecard user knows, Graham has a tendency to disappear from time to time while Entrecard, his 3 blogs, and everything else gets neglected.  This is a good move, because now I won’t have to read about this contest crap any more.  Did you know an Entrecard admin has to manually transfer the contest winnings?  Don’t the admins have enough work without this contest nonsense?

Conclusion:  Graham Langdon is an idea guy who never follows through in the long run.  Entrecard was a great idea, but a terribly run business.  You can’t open shop and then ignore the customers.   Did it really take 8 months to get a team of mods onboard to weed out spam, or was that a top down decision to fill Entrecard’s ranks with spammers just to inflate user numbers?

Time to give out the one year grades:

• Executive management:  F – Absentee ownership is noticed by both the membership and potential VC investors.  Failure to properly monetize Entrecard after one year makes me think the owner was looking to dump it and leave that sticky issue to someone else.
• Administrators: A Minus – Phirate and Ben both worked hard, they make the grade for having to “go it alone”.  Some of their decisions may have backfired, but at least they gave it their best shot.
• Mods:  C minus - Vanishing from site but keeping the title, then overmodderating when they show up, I’m not going to give each a separate grade.  They do their best in an unpaid position.  In the past I had direct access to 3 mods, so I could message anyone online when I saw forum violations.  These days the forum is so empty I see people responding to spam, and no active mods on my messenger to report it if I wanted to.
• Entrecard itself: B – Despite executive mismanagement, Entrecard earns a solid B.  Who cares if it’s a traffic exchange as long as It sends visitors to small blogs.  When you made your first post on the Internet all you wanted were a few eyeballs looking at your article.  You didn’t care about bounce rate, time on page, or monetizing that traffic. 

Room for improvement?  The real value of Entrecard lies in networking and not the traffic.  The visitors Entrecard brings are nice, but like Stumble or Digg traffic, it’s fleeting at best.  The connections you make with other bloggers who have similar goals, niches, or even personalities are the real treasure.  I can’t just go out an strike up a partnership with an A-list blogger.  They would laugh me off.  But I can reach out to fellow bloggers who have attained an identical point in their blogging careers.  Trade links, share ideas, and maybe even form a web ring or advertising collective.  If Entrecard would promote itself along these lines, nobody could argue over it’s numbers.   If I say the connections I made through Entrecard are valuable, it’s tough for a critic to refute that. 

Sadly, Entrecard has a history of ignoring the ideas of its members.  In addition, the forums have become the nesting place of annoying gadflys.  Hardly a positive place, making it all the more difficult to achieve networking goals.  Perhaps instead of a Contests section of the forum they should have a Looking for a Partner to… where you could post in search of people who share your network goals.  Whether it be guest posting, contests, link exchanges, or something grander.  This is not the same as the old marketing forum.  This would be a place for people who want to get together and share ideas.  Go ahead, give Entrecard your own grade after one year.