Just about 3 days ago, Entrecard’s advertising pricing structure has been changed thoroughly. Dropping the cards on a blog’s widget will no further affect the advertising cost on that blog; which is the only good move of Entrecard. In this post, I have mentioned two problems caused by this new structure and their solutions too.

Let me just introduce Entrecard’s new mechanism for advertising price quickly. Now on, the advertising cost on your blog is simply 2 to the power n, where n is the number of ads that are in queue. So if you have 4 advertisers in queue, then the advertising cost for the fifth one would be 2^4 = 16 ec/day.

If you want, you can read more on Entrecard’s blog.

The only thing that is good in this new structure is that, it will terminate the activity of gaming with the system; that is, dropping cards in excessive amount daily. Now on, famous blogs will have much higher cost than others, which was not the case before. But except this good thing, there are really two serious problems with this new structure, which are mentioned below:

Problems caused by the new pricing structure

First problem – I really can’t understand why they have chosen such exponentially rising advertising cost. If you advertise on a 1024 ec/day charging blog, the next advertiser will have to pay 2048 ec/day for the same spot. How can this be fair in anyway? Is the popularity and traffic of that blog is doubled in one day? No! Then why one should be charged the double figure?

Second problem – Due to sky-touching cost, the advertiser will have to wait for the price to come down and so, they will be checking the advertising cost frequently. And the one who is first to see new lower figure, will become the advertiser. Others will have to wait again one day, fielding for the lower cost. Isn’t this annoying and wasting of time for advertisers?

Two simple solutions to these problems

Solution to the first – Let the advertising cost be somewhat linearly rising. I have personally thought of a scheme for that. It’s described below:

Let the cost of advertising be zero, only if there isn’t any ad in queue. Then after, cost increases by an adding factor 10 ec up to 5 ad-queues. So, if there are 4 ads in queue, the price will be 40 ec/day. Then after, let the adding factor be 20 ec up to 10 ad-queues. Then after, adding factor is 50 ec for up to 15 ad-queue and for the rest of the ad-queues, adding factor is 100 ec.

For the sake of convenience, I have put the whole idea in the form of table as below:

Cost Ad-queue
10

1
20

2
30

3
40

4
50

5
70

6
90

7
110

8
130

9
150

10
200

11
250

12
300

13
350

14
400

15
500

16
600

17
700

18
800

19
900

20


This is just an approximation from me; about how should the pricing structure behave.

Solution to the second – To resolve the second problem, let the bloggers be allowed to put up to 4 Entrecard widgets (Each widget showing different ad). The number 4 is again an approximation, based on the number of advertisers that are willing to advertise. That number can be more, but should not be less. Also, a square spot having 4 Entrecard widgets in 2 rows and 2 columns will look fine.

If this step is done, more advertisers will be able to put their ads at quite lower price, though resulting in comparatively more income for the blogger. Evidently for the prices to be low and stable, each widget must have its own ad-queue.

So, this is my opinion for the pricing structure in Entrecard. I am eager to see your comments about this idea.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!