I Welcome Your Entre-thoughts

For those of you who aren't involved with Entrecard, this post won't make any sense.
If that's the case, you can go eat some chocolate and pretend I wrote something hilarious-- be sure and practice your light-hearted chuckling in case someone asks you what I wrote. Just make something up. Maybe something involving Eskimos and jello.

Ok... you Entre-folks are probably aware that they've switched over to accepting paid ads.
Previously it was just a fun way for blogs to advertise on each other (using pretend money called "entre-credits", or "ec"), and you could surf around and discover new blogs you hadn't read before. I liked it.

Now they're adding paid ads to the mix. The thing is, WE (the bloggers) don't directly make any money off of them. Only Entrecard gets to keep that money. Our blogs are just sort of a tool to bring revenue to Entrecard now. They ARE supposedly unveiling a thing this weekend, with some sort of plan where the blogger can make a small amount of cash, if they jump through a bunch of hoops and cash in their credits. We haven't been told yet what the amount-per-credit will be, but I doubt it will be very high.
Plus, they're going to be discriminating against the bloggers who don't permit paid ads to appear. Only the sheep who blindly accept a high percentage of paid ads will get to cash out their ec points.

I find this kind of distasteful, much like a forgotten lump of limburger cheese stuffed in the toes of an unwashed gym sock, discovered in a small attic during an unseasonably hot August.

Plus, I'd kind of prided myself on keeping the Jannaverse an ad-free zone. My other two blogs, Jantics and Jantrails, have had ads on them in the past, but even then I tried keeping it to a bare minimum.
There IS an option (on the "advert settings" link in the Entrecard dashboard) to stop accepting ads, but it disables ALL ads-- not just the paid ones. I learned that today when I went to my dashboard and discovered that my ad price had dropped all the way down to 8ec. Eight! Well, of course it was because no one could buy an ad; I'd inadvertently disabled EVERYONE.

Sorry about that; if you were one of the people who tried. I wasn't trying to make it inaccessible to everyone; I just wanted to automatically reject all the paid ads. And it seems there's no way to do that. We have to go to our dashboard every day and individually reject each and every ad that applies, and if we don't reject it within 24 hours, the Entrecard people start putting it on our blogs anyway.

This is rotten, I tell you.

So I've been considering the possibility of leaving Entrecard altogether. I know a lot of other people have already made that choice, either hastily or after a lot of thought.
I've been giving it a lot of thought.
Still, I'd like to know what the rest of you think.

If you're an Entrecard person, how have you reacted to the onslaught of paid ads?
What do you think about their policy that "regular" blog ads (the old-fashioned kind paid with ec, not cash) only get 50% of the viewing time now, having to share 50% of the time with the paid ads? Doesn't it seem like the "regular" blog ads are getting cheated out of half their time?
Discuss.
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