Unfortunately no mailing list as such, but you could subscribe to this blogs feed, I am hoping to ask people to register later this week, those that do will be the ones that see the project evolve as it will be just the basics.

I plan to have advertising on the site itself, this may be just adsense or something, or direct advertising or mix of both. I have also been thinking of a ‘membership’ option, so for small monthly fee users can upgrade, I do need to look at what benefits they could receive from upgrading.

1. If I went down that road then paid ads would definitely have their own widget and it would be on a revenue share basis, the only problem I can see is attracting enough advertisers to fill the space available, especially in the early days. This could be something we introduce at a later stage, as EC have once we have stats etc but as said making it totally optional and beneficial to all

2. I don’t want to value the credits, EC have done this and it’s not been great for them, I may make ‘free credits’ one of the benefits of upgrading your membership.

have you started some sort of newsletter or email sign-up for notification somewhere?

i do think that you should consider how you will support your project. and that you consider it from the beginning. people don’t adjust well to change…

some things you might consider:
1.) i think that each community member should be give the choice to host a second paid ad or not and the proceeds of the ad could be split in some equitable manner- per click or per thousand. dunno
that is ultimately my main issue with entrecard; i do understand the expense of running such a social ad network but i would have preferred to have had the choice to support entrecard’s paid ads with an additional widget than to have my community networking ad hijacked by paid ads.

2.) i think that members who want to promote their website but don’t have enough credits should be able to buy credits to do so. it is helpful, especially in the beginning , to get some traffic to the site and it adds some funding options to your projects.

I agree that the traffic generated is not always the best, I have some thoughts about the popularity rankings and the dropping rate will not the most important factor.

Even before the paid ads, Entrecard’s problem was really poor quality traffic, with a high bounce rate. The traffic wasn’t about real readers, but droppers leaving quickly just to get their credit through the widget.

Popularity had nothing to do with readership outside of EC, but just from dropping, which anyone with a lousy blog could do.

If you duplicate the system exactly as they had it, it will create the same bad quality traffic problem. Maybe you want to implement it in a way to avoid the 300 drops, and create a real interaction between bloggers…

I have left EC last week.

If you manage to create a system that will avoid these problems, you have a great idea and a great project going on!

Sandy

Thanks for the support, I’m getting good feedback on the idea of a ‘membership’ option but it needs lots of thought, initially it will be free service.