Entrecard selling out?

After the inter-fad for blogging traffic, Entrecard, was such a huge success things have drastically slowed down. The infatuation phase was fun for everyone, as we all watched hundreds or thousands of new hits to our blogs (granted, most were quite superficial hits- they were still hits). Entrecard has slowly opted for new features here and there, and we watched as Entrecard's brilliant ideas fades in the wind like every other traffic generating system. It's a brilliant idea, but never built to last. For those bloggers who have stuck with entrecarding this far, now the game has really changed, they are now getting paid advertisers (not blogs) to buy space on our websites. Yes, we can approve and reject these ads, but they are pushing for us to accept, and basically make them money. They are allowing us to BUY these ad spaces- how nice of them. But not offering us very much in return.

Here is a couple of questions and answers I found on the forums:

Am I getting credits or something for accepting these paid ads?

No. We are expecting everyone to do their best to help support Entrecard within their own capabilities. We have decided to leave how you do that up to you, at least initially. We hope that many of you will choose to support Entrecard and the users by supporting this feature, and allowing us to earn money both to pay for hosting and to fund the upcoming CashOut feature.

Why is this even necessary?

In simple terms, Entrecard needs money in order to pay for things like web hosting, development etc. For those who aren't familiar with the industry, things like the Market cost upwards of US$7,000 to put together, and hosting costs are in excess of US$1,000/mn for the systems needed to serve the EC community at this time. It's not cheap. So, to be clear, your free Entrecard account costs Entrecard a fair chunk of money. We've already done some things, such as selling credits, to help balance these costs so we can continue operating. Paid ads is simply another option.

What's this CashOut thing?

CashOut is a feature coming up shortly. It's our carrot to give back to the community for helping support the whole system. In essence, we take 75% of the funds acquired via the paid ads programme, and we put that into a fund that will be used by Entrecard to buy credits from users (if they want to sell) in exchange for US$. This fund is accumulating as we speak, and I hope to have the CashOut user interface complete by this time next week.

Personally, this marks another notch in the road to either selling the company, closing shop, or selling themselves out to porno sites and internet scams. Sad entrecard. I am thinking about removing entrecard from my blogs completely. I barely get any traffic from them anyways. Have you had any luck or misfortune with entrecard lately?