Planet Google, Adgitize, CMF and Bye-bye Entrecard
Submitted by The Thin Red Line
This was supposed to be a post about Planet Google, Randall Stross’ engaging and well-written history of the Internet services company with the audaciously stated goal of “organizing all the information on the planet”. I have no problems whatsoever Recommending this book to any Internet users who want to be informed about what this rapidly growing company, that at least some of the time seems to live up to it’s official “do no evil” philosophy is really up to while dominating online search, making huge forays into e-mail with it’s G-mail service, and taking on Microsoft in a free software fight with its online documents and spreadsheets service and it’s recently released Chrome browser.* But today I have a different post instead. Over on the CMF Ads Forums, Turnip of Power posted his regret at not being able to find and Stumble a post comparing the costs of advertising on Adgitize, CMF and Entrecard. So I did some checking into it and here is what I found:
- Adgitize charges advertisers $14.00/month for one 125 x 125 advertisement displayed across their entire network of blogs
- CMF Ads charges between $0.25 and $1.25/month for one 125 x125 advertisement one one blog of your choosing
- Entrecard charges as little as $0.012 per day for one 125×125 advertisement on one blog of your choosing**,***
- Enrecard’s highest priced ad as of this writing costs 3,072EC which works out to $18.43 per day or an utterly astounding $571.39 per month****
So looking only at the cost of advertising on these three networks, CMF Ads offers the lowest possible rates and keeps total advertising costs quite reasonable, even on the most popular sites. Adgitize by comparison charges you $14.00 per month to participate in a very Entrecard like system that is all about visiting other members’ blogs to gain popularity and page views. And then Entrecard where the cheapest ads are almost as cheap as CMF’s lowest priced ads, but the highest priced ads are charging truly astronomical rates that almost can’t pay off Except in terms of junk traffic that stops by each day to click the widget and never really stops to read the blog or participate in comments.
The fact is that the junk traffic from Entrecard can be downright addictive. When I was getting 150–250 visitors/day on average just from maniacally going out and clicking widgets on at least that many and often as many as 300 widgets/day. And my Alexa went down below 100K and my pagerank went up to 4 and those numbers looked so nice that I just kept on clicking and clicking. Until finally one day I just said, “hey, wait a minute. My time could be much better spent reading books and putting out a better blog.”. While a few of my Entrecard ads have produced some traffic, the ads effectiveness seems to have gone way down since I got off the 300 click treadmill.
Which leads me to announce that sometime today when my last sold ad has been displayed and the spot becomes vacant I will be removing the Entrecard widget. If you have a blog and have not already signed up at CMF Ads, I urge you to click here and go register and submit your blog RIGHT NOW! While you will certainly want to participate in the forums and get to know your fellow bloggers and their sites, CMF Ads credits are all, 100% paid for in cash, via PayPal. There is no reason to mindlessly visit every blog every day, no widgets to click to register your visit. YOU get to set your own ad price for as little as 25 cents per month or as much as you choose. Then YOU get to keep ALL (not just 25%) of the credits that were paid to advertise on your site and you can SELL your credits back (at 50% of the then current Sales price) any time you want. There is NO QUESTION that CMF Ads offers the best value for every blog publisher.
To all my Entrecard friends, I hope you will continue to visit even though the widget is going away. There were some great times in the early days of Entrecard and I wish every blogger on that service every success. And to all my friends on CMF Ads, Semper Excelsior. Ever Upward.
*and let that sentence serve as my 2009 entry for Longest Run On Compound Complex Sentence when it’s time to select nominees for the Grammar Awards. My previous entry can be found here.
**The quoted daily rate is based on the ad selling at the minimum 2EC sale price and calculates the EC to USD conversion at Entrecard’s official $6.00/1,000EC exchange rate, that very few users have ever actually bought any EC at.
***The monthly equivalent cost of a 2EC ad works out to $0.36/month although it would only theoretically be possible to buy a full month of advertising on any given blog at this rate if you purchased each day at the moment the previous day’s advertising ended AND no other advertiser bid on the site during that entire month.
****Of course this outrageously priced ad also could not be purchased for an entire month without further driving up the daily rate Exponentially for each day booked
