Entrecard Scam - Mongo Credits
I finally signed up for entrecard yesterday and after toying with it for about an hour I realized what a sham it is. I estimate that less than 1% of all traffic generated by entrecard is viable, worthwhile traffic. Instead, it is a brilliant idea on their part to take advantage of every blogger’s #1 desire: free traffic. Instead of getting useful traffic, what you are getting are people popping in, dropping their card, and scrambling back to their entrecard dashboard to see if they have enough credits to buy that ad on blog X. For some reason…I guess the eternal optimism that goes along with a profound desire for anything free….they think (or hope) that when they place their entrecard ad, they will get useful traffic. What do they get instead? They get people popping in, dropping their card, and rushing back to their entrecard dashboard to see if they have enough credits to buy that ad on blog Y. I’m going to coin this phenomenon as the Entrecard Zombie Circle.
So what to do? I have this worthless widget installed on my blog that will never provide any useful results. Do I take it off, or try to play the system? I like the way you think…I played the system. I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to play the system like most….I was going to shake things up. I was going to have more of those worthless little credits than any man alive….and have my little ad on every blog in the zombie network.
The first thing I did was download the firefox plugin iMacros. For those that don’t know about firefox, it is an open source web browser. Open source means that it is both free and open to programmers to write plugins and widgets for it, much like wordpress. So you can do much more with firefox as opposed to other web browsers and what iMacros does is allow you to record a series of actions within the browser and replay it as a loop.
Next, if you are signed in to your entrecard account and go to an entrecard ad and scroll your mouse over the “drop” button, you will notice a link like this - http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=4607 where the number at the end is that users id. You get credit for the drop because your id is stored in a cookie. If you cut and paste that link into a new browser, you get nothing but the drop button…you don’t have to wait for their blog to load. Now I just needed to cycle that link, starting from 1 to infinity to cover every drop I could make. This took some thinking.
I started thinking about page hit counters. They start at one and go to infinity, but how to make it work with the entrecard drop links? I created a blank html page and found some javascript code that uses cookies to display how many times you have viewed a particular page. I morphed this with the entracard drop url so that when the page was loaded, it displayed the text http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=1 Then, each time the page was refreshed, the drop url’s id number at the end increased by one. So now I could use iMacro to cycle through the act of dropping on every entrecard user id in existence. The javascript went as follows -
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled</title></head>
<body>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
function nameDefined(ckie,nme)
{
var splitValues
var i
for (i=0;i<ckie.length;++i)
{
splitValues=ckie[i].split(”=”)
if (splitValues[0]==nme) return true
}
return false
}function delBlanks(strng)
{
var result=”"
var i
var chrn
for (i=0;i<strng.length;++i) {
chrn=strng.charAt(i)
if (chrn!=” “) result += chrn
}
return result
}
function getCookieValue(ckie,nme)
{
var splitValues
var i
for(i=0;i<ckie.length;++i) {
splitValues=ckie[i].split(”=”)
if(splitValues[0]==nme) return splitValues[1]
}
return “”
}
function insertCounter() {
readCookie()
displayCounter()
}
function displayCounter() {
document.write(’<H3 ALIGN=”CENTER”>’)
document.write(”http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=”)
if(counter==1) document.write(”the first time.”)
else document.write(counter)
document.writeln(’</H3>’)
}
function readCookie() {
var cookie=document.cookie
counter=0
var chkdCookie=delBlanks(cookie) //are on the client computer
var nvpair=chkdCookie.split(”;”)
if(nameDefined(nvpair,”pageCount”))
counter=parseInt(getCookieValue(nvpair,”pageCount”))
++counter
var futdate = new Date()
var expdate = futdate.getTime()
expdate += 3600000 * 24 *30 //expires in 1 hour
futdate.setTime(expdate)var newCookie=”pageCount=”+counter
newCookie += “; expires=” + futdate.toGMTString()
window.document.cookie=newCookie
}
// –>
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
insertCounter()
// –>
</SCRIPT>
</body>
</html>
Now what this did was display what I wanted, but in simple text form rather than a click-able link. To get around this problem, I downloaded the firefox linkification plugin which turns any segment of text beginning with “http:” into a click-able link. Then, using firefox, I was able to bring up the page I created, started recording actions, clicked the link, clicked drop, hit back twice, refreshed the page, then stopped recording. At that point, I just told firefox to replay the loop and there it went…..dropping on every entrecard user id from 1 to infinity…..all while I sat there laughing! In another browser, I kept refreshing my entrecard dashboard and watched the credits pile high. I was already writing down some of the laws I was going to make when I soon would rule the world, when the credits stopped piling up. Apparently entrecard has code that caught my sneaky act of defiance. My credits dropped to -47. Now even when I do a legitimate drop, I get no credit. BUSTED So for now at least, fluorescent stretchy camouflage pants are still legal.
Thinking a little deeper….there is apparently no defense within entrecard to keep people from dropping from the direct drop url because for a while, I was getting mongo credits. It must be something regarding the number of credits amassed over a certain period of time. Hmmm…gets me thinking again…
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I finally decided to write a comment on your blog. I just wanted to say good job. I really enjoy reading your posts.
Tina Russell
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
Thank you so much. Hopefully I either help or amuse you!
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I have absolutely no idea what you did, but i enjoyed reading about it. If that makes sense.
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Ha…did I do that bad of a job explaining it?
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March 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Haha, no you did fine. This is quite the little cleaver hit.
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March 19th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
No no, you did great explaining it, i’m just not very familiar with programming and what not, but I am sure I could follow your steps and get mad entrecard credit. You my friend = great teacher. Keep it up.
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March 19th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
You can get mad entrecard credit for a while…then it shuts down….still scheming.
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March 19th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
incredible, this is an awesome post, i’ll have to feature this on my blog
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
I appreciate that! I’m trying to get the word out. I’m going to check your blog out.
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March 19th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
You totally miss the point of Entrecard. It’s for “introducing” yourself to other bloggers and “dropping” your card is like dropping a business card off at someone’s blog. The card dropping and advertising on other blogs is the unique thing that sets it apart from mybloglog, blogcatalog, and bumpzee.
You get out of it what you put into it. Sure, mass card droppers don’t stay long on your blog -but many do. And no matter how you try to scam the system you can only drop 300 card per day anyway. People do that by hand all the time to reach the top spots - so any attempts to “melt down the system” are futile.
Drop a couple dozen cards per day, find other blogs you like and places to comment. They will start to come to your blog and you will get new rss subs and permanent visitors.
If you reply to this email me, because I’ll never know since you don’t have the “reply to comments” plugin installed.
=)
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
My point with entrecard is that while they say that they encourage people to stay, read, and comment in order to make contacts….the very premise of entrecard….their soul existence…. is to allow people to “drop their card” without doing ANY of those things. You should get an email on this because I do have the “reply to comments” plugin.
I enjoy your blog, by the way.
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Thanks for the reply, and the comment on my site Nate. I didn’t realize you have reply to comments because in my browser there is no “subscribe to comments” box showing.
You can’t force anyone to do anything, and there are only so many safeguards you can put in place. The “dropping a card” idea is pretty novel, and the point of my entrecard post is that you can gain great value from it, meet lots of other great bloggers, and get lots of new readers by using the service.
My point is that many, many bloggers (like myself) read all kinds of posts while dropping cards. The reason I don’t drop more cards is because I get caught up in reading the blogs I drop cards on. Also - in your post you kind of “mock” entrecard by saying how worthless it is and how you tried to game it the very first day.
It’s ok not to like something, but if you actually tried to use it and find other bloggers in your niche you might find you can actually get some good traffic from it. As you found out - good traffic doesn’t come for free, you have to actually invest some time yourself.
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
Exactly…and you and I have opened this line of communication the old fashioned way….by me reading your blog and commenting (with a shameless plug nonetheless) You seem to be the extreme exeption to the entrecard rule in that you actually read the blogs you visit through them. If we had simply dropped cards on one anothers’ blogs, I doubt we would be providing a discussion for our readers now. What browser do you use by the way?
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March 19th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
That’s a good one Nate. Some sort of timing and randomization technique to simulate human interaction would probably fool their ’safeguards’.
If I were to write an exploit for EntreCard (not that I would
) I’d probably use C# and automate IE via the .NET Framework so it looked like a ‘legit’ browser visit rather than a Javascript. IE, in spite of all its warts, is a breeze to automate for both good and nefarious purposes.
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
Actually the javascript was just used to generate the links…..the automation was done within firefox. Excellent points, though, and thanks for the comment!
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March 19th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
That’s certainly one way to do it. I wrote a php script that would generate a user specified number of sequential Entrecard ‘drop’ url’s. It worked great for about three minutes before Entrecard noticed my script churning through them. Final tally 200 drops, negative 3000 credits before I noticed.
After some trial and error I modified the script so that it would generate an iframe with the Entrecard profile URL in it, wait x seconds, then open a second iframe with the drop url as its source. Then it’d start over moving through the sequence. I got it working great, but by that time I was over 9000 credits in the hole, which is the point I decided it wasn’t worth playing with any more. That was a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still in the hole for 5000.
Not being able to advertise on the network has kind of dampened my passion for Entrecarding. I still drop when I see the widget, but I don’t do any focused dropping like I used to. If I ever climb out of my self-imposed hole I may regain my enthusiasm, but right now the prospect is met with a resounding ‘meh.’
Although the quality of the traffic to my site leaves something to be desired, the way I look at it, you get what you pay for. I have found a lot of great sites through chaindropping, and a lot of excellent fodder for blog posts.
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Nate reply on March 19, 2008:
Id say something could be done with automated signups…building 300 credits per day on each account, then transferring them to one…..but wouldn’t be as impressive as what I was hoping to do. Is that your site you link to? Pretty intriguing.
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Jotun reply on March 20, 2008:
The thought had crossed my mind, but in the end it hardly seemed worth the effort. Like everyone else I’m trying to make money, and it seems that the time spent powerdropping is better used towards generating proft.
I am the owner of BookMarkMoney.com. It has only been up for about 5 weeks, and traffic has been sluggish, but I’ve been promoting the heck out of it every way possible - EntreCard, BlogRush, etc. It seems to be gathering some steam.
I originally found your site from a comment you left on my site’s blog, and I’m glad I did.
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March 19th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Nate, me and Chandler have no idea what you’ve just said, but that’s OK. Maybe some day we will. Anywho, Entrecard is not at all that amazing traffic tool it wants people to think it is, but still, there are some advantages I see: while dropping my card (I don’t do that very often), I read the blogs and subscribe and comment on those that interest me; and also, when you display your banner on smone’s blog, it’s there for the world too see, meaning regular readers, and other people besides mad entrecard power droppers. So I’m thinking even if only 10 regular readers that blog has see my ad and get interested, that’s 10 visitors I dind’t have before.
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March 19th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
thanks Nate. I used Firefox in Windows Vista 2.0.0.12. I guess I don’t consider myself an extreme example since I found Reward Rebel, Affilliate Confession, and Affiliate Marketing Cash Cow all through entrecard. Some found me, others I found, we read and comment on each other’s blogs a lot.
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March 19th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Good point, Anca. I just think that it has people wasting too much time on dropping cards and staring at their entrecard dashboard instead of writing and building real relationships.
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Anca reply on March 19, 2008:
I know it requires too much time to really use it to a benefit, that’s a downfall. And you know what else I’ve noticed? A lot of blogs have silly (as in humongous) credit prices for advertising for one day there, and those prices DO NOT reflect on the quality of the blog. I’ve seen lots of blogs having a price of a few hundred credits per day, but they are about nothing, no interesting content, no comments and readers. The only reason why the price is so high is because they spend a lot of time power dropping. It’s a flawed system, the price of ads on blogs should reflect in some way the quality of the blog, the number of links to it and visitors. For me to be able to advertise on such a blog, I would have to spend a whole day doing nothing but dropping cards like a maniac. And then buy an ad for one day on a blogspot.com blog about “anything under the sun”
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Nate reply on March 20, 2008:
That’s the problem with any system based on “credits” that have no relation to money.
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March 19th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Nate good points, I initially didn’t like entrecard but now I seem to like. In any paid traffic schemes, CTRs are usually less then 5%. If you get 5 actual readers for every 100 Entrecard visits, thats is still great in my opinion.
Good job explaining the trick, I got it.
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March 20th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Nate, great idea! I’ve been playing with Entrecard for a little less than a month I think and I’m not all that impressed. Almost every day I’ve spent clicking through the endless progression of sites I’ve tried to think of a good way to do what you did…excellent job! As I read this post and comments I was thinking…”with a little throttling and maybe validating the links before clicking…” bu then to what end?
If you look in the Entrecard marketplace there are several folks listing 1000EC for $10, a penny a point. I wonder if they sell any because if they do, now the EC has a value and piling up 200-300 a day might become a worthwhile venture…but only if it were automated. The time it would require for me to amass 1000EC is certainly worth more than $10.
It is important (IMHO) that we look at “opportunities” like Entrecard and evaluate the opportunity cost to see if the return is worth the effort. Sure, we all like playing with new toys, but I for one am trying to eat, not just sit in the sandbox playing with toys.
Kinda rambling but I’m still workin on my first cup of coffee this morning…sorry.
Great post and comment thread!
- Thom
PS - I got here from Make Money Online (BU), NOT Entrecard.
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Nate reply on March 20, 2008:
Thom, thanks for the excellent comment. I’m definetely always looking for new ways to increase revenue!
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March 20th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Heh. Re the ‘hack’: please, give me *some* credit
we’ve had defenses in place against that since day one.
Regarding the nature of the traffic, there’s a post on the blog where I discuss the concept of the ‘commuter’ traffic class. It’s not useful for everyone, and we don’t expect the entire world to decide that EC is the thing for them, but we do truly believe it makes a big difference for our users, gives them opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
To be honest, when we started, we never expected people to become as..dedicated about dropping as they have, we thought it would be a casual thing, in the same way dropping your business card at a cafe is - people don’t go from cafe to cafe dropping their cards, they just drop when they happen to be there.
That said, my belief at this point is that many users are still in the initial phase of discovery - we’ve provided a safe, cashless way to promote their blog, to learn about blogging and to interact with people who are succeeding. I believe that as time goes on the demographic will change from primarily new users, to a more even mix of enthusiastic new users, and old hands who simply have Entrecard as part of their day.
What is a “mongo” credit?
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March 20th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
So having an inside perspective of entrecard, I’m thankful you would take the time to share with my readers…several of them are definately fans. I’m sure they will have questions, but I guess my biggest question would be if you have any plans in the works to curtail the “power droppers”? I don’t mean like what I did, but the ones that obviously spend 0 time on the blog. Oh, and MONGO = LOTS
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March 21st, 2008 at 11:48 am
Heh, this was amusing. I wonder how much of this one could get away with… Is it a certain number of credits in a row, or maybe a certain repetitiveness of timing that triggers the alarm?
I never signed up for Entrecard. Looks too much like a buzzword to me. I might try it though sooner or later, just for fun.
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March 21st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I definately had some fun!
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March 21st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
You are not the first person to state that it was a sham. I have a discussion regarding it on bloggertalk.net where one of my members said it was a waste.
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March 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
It definetely isn’t for me. And it sure has provided for a good discussion.
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