Breaking News: Entrecard now allowing credit sales!

This just came across the wire from Entrecard:

Greetings Entrecarders!

Today I have VERY important news for the entire Entrecard community. In approximately one week, we will be co-launching an Ad Network and a Credit Cashout Service. What this means, immediately to you, is the following:

A real ad network

We will be opening as much as 50% of our ad impressions network-wide to third party advertisers. We will be accepting cash payments to run 125x125 advertisements through our widget network. Ads will be sold as run of network, or targeted by category, for a low CPM rate to be announced. Please plan your daily entrecard ad purchasing accordingly. Whereas before, when you purchased an ad, you were buying a minimum of 100% of the impressions, you are now buying a minimum of 50%. However, the maximum is still 100% of the impressions, because if we have no ads booked for that category, or for the network, for any given day, you will still get all of the impressions.

Exchange your credits for CASH

With the money we make selling as much as 50% of our network impressions, we will purchase your credits from you, and delete them from the system. This means we're going to let you sell credits for cash, right from your dashboard! This has been the single most requested feature since we launched Entrecard. Members have clamored for a way to sell Entrecard credits for cash, but the same problem always arose: where does the money come from to let people sell their credits? How do we use our greatest resource (millions of daily impressions across ~60 niches) to benefit everyone? After much deliberation, the answer became clear. We must open up our ad network, and funnel the proceeds of the entire operation back to you, the members!

The state of the economy

The state of the world's economy is grim. We are in a global recession. People need simple ways to make money now more than ever before. Therefore, it became our imperative to turn Entrecard into a viable way for bloggers to make money. We think we've figured out a great way to do this. By allowing you to cash out your credits, and allowing you to earn credits by selling products and services in ourmarket, advertising on your blog, publishing on your blog, and dropping cards, we're making big moves to help you earn a second income.

In parallel, the Entrecard economy has been in a state of inflation since day one. Every day, more credits are created than are deleted. As of writing this, there are 44 million credits in the Entrecard economy, and we're adding more each day. This is not sustainable, and so it has become clear that we need a more efficient way than advertising taxes to eliminate credits from the economy. The good news is that if this works, we'll be able to lower the advertising tax.

So, by paying you cash for your credits, and then wiping them from the system, we estimate that we can delete as many as 1 to 2 million credits per day. This will immediately shift the economy into DEFLATION, which means your credits will become MORE valuable, instead of less valuable, both in their purchasing power and in their monetary value.

Finally, Entrecard has needed a solid revenue model since day one. We are excited to have settled on a viable revenue model that allows us to make money at the same time as passing on the majority of our revenues back to you. For any given day, we will take 75% of our revenues and pass them on to you by way of cashing out your credits. We will take the remaining 25% for ourselves to grow the business as a solid revenue source.

What if I don't want these ads on my site?

We have always prided ourselves in being a service that offers you complete control over what does and does not appear on your site. Yet, at the same time, we're forced to mitigate this ideal with our decision to launch a more traditional ad network, as a way to make you money, restore the economy to balance, and make some money for ourselves.

We will continue to allow you to reject any ad you wish. However, to reject ads from paying advertisers, you will need to pay a credit fee for each ad you wish to reject. We don't know how much this will be just yet.

New Above-the-fold rule

If this is going to work for everyone, we must also mandate an above-the-fold rule. Thus moving forward, it is necessary for all Entrecard members place their widget above the fold to maintain an active account. The rule won't go into effect until we launch our ad network, which is about a week away, so please plan accordingly and make the necessary changes as soon as possible.

To recap

You can boil this down to the following 4 bullet points:

1. In a week, we're launching an ad network where anyone can advertise through Entrecard widgets for CPM rates. This can be run of network advertising, or targeted by category. We are making available 50% of our inventory, or approximately 40 million monthly impressions.
2. With the money we make, we are going to buy credits back from you. You will be allowed to sell credits via your dashboard, and we will devote 75% of daily sales to buying credits back.
3. The economy will no longer be in a state of inflation, but rather in deflation which means your credits will gradually start becoming more valuable.
4. For all this to work, we must institute an above-the-fold rule, which goes into effect in a weeks.

We realize these are pretty huge changes, and there are going to be a lot of questions. This is part of the reason we're announcing this a week early, so we can field all the questions, address everyone's concerns, and all get on the same page.