When do you know that something is getting addictive? Usually when the demand for a service or a product increases, and the number of sellers follows suit. This is happening right now in Entrecard.

I. The Signs:

1. Entrecard credits being vended at Ebay by sitecash.info (and there are bids!)

2. People have been asking in forums if it is legal to exchange a certain number of Entrecard Credits for dollars, and Entrecard’s lead developer (Phirate) says,

• “We explicitly permit the sale of Entrecard credits. It was part of the plan from day one. We are watching all of this closely to ensure that things don’t unbalance, and if they do some changes may need to be made, but overall we believe entrecard credits have real value, and thus dollar value. Exactly what that value is isn’t clear at this time although we have our own internal valuation.”

3. People are getting curious if Entre will allow third party programs to drop the cards (based on a forum post). To which, Phirate replied “No”. But would anyone ask the question if the possible use of a bot did not occur to that person?

4. Several blogs have been joining the system and these contain only a few or no stuff, except for that big Entre widget at the header or upper sidebar. These are obviously “harvester” blogs that people may go to to drop cards (therefore earning the owner credits, which may be transfered to a main account). In the moneytization point of view, why will anyone bother to set up these blogs if not to sell E-credit for real money? Ok, benefit of the doubt, they might use these credits for their own promotion and not for selling. But my point is, they obviously don’t want to market these “dummy” blogs’ content as there is no content to market. And obviously, they won’t even develop these blogs because there is nothing to develop.

5. The demand for gazillions of E-credits is increasing. Everytime a person drops a card on someone’s blog, the price of advertising in that blog increases. So the price (in E-credits) to advertise in more popular blogs like John Chow’s will increase hour by hour, as hoards of readers drop their cards on his widget. What is a newbie Entrecard user to do if he wants to catch the advert price on JC’s blog before it increases some more? Buy credits. Using real money.

II. A Lesson from Blog Rush?

While Blog Rush’s traffic promotion system is a dismal failure, they did do something right. They set out to manually screen the blogs that are coming in so that each blog in their system is a quality one, and eligible for the free traffic/promotion service.

III. My Take

I am very lucky to have joined Entrecard when it was starting. Regardless of what others say about Entrecard, I was there when John Chow’s advert price was just close to 50 e-credits, and I could see the potential of the service to increase traffic in my blog. It was friendlier back then (goodness, it was just a month ago!).