Thanks to MathTeacher’s comments in the previous post, I will stop dreaming of ways to spend all that money and get back to work LOL! Just also shows how much “we the people” would love a bit of help from our government versus the elite always getting a helping hand. The state of affairs worsens as the days pile up. While bailing out single entities (which by the way most of us ordinary people would have landed in jail for), once again the government overlooks the critical component in any scenario. We, the little people, are the backbone of any country. With no money to spend, it doesn’t really matter how many special interests they bail out does it. We end up footing a bill that no one can afford to foot.

While the Birk Economics thing sparked hope, unfortunately, the math doesn’t pan out. Even at the 700 billion dollar level, it’s still peanuts. Can’t anyone think up a way that would put everyone on equal footing, ensure their futures, and help in the here and now?!?!

Okay, coming down of the soapbox (but I think “we the people” had better start yelling and screaming louder!), on to the next bit of news for the day.

Entrecard is changing its platform (slightly?). Whereas an individual used to be able to sell their extra credits, that is no longer possible. However, on the plus side, EC has dropped their price on available credits to purchase each day. I haven’t double checked, but they did put a limit on availability, which is a good thing. There are many other rules and regulations that were changed (updated); these arrived in an email this morning, which I will replicate here (in case yours ended up in the trash):

<blockquote>
Overhaul of Entrecard Economy

In order to continue operating in the long-term, Entrecard needs make some significant changes. These are summarized below:

1.  Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits

2.  More pricing increments: Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising

3.  Members are not allowed to sell credits: This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms.

4.  Credit transfer limits: Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week. Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs.

5.  Transfer tax: From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1).

6.  Blogs cannot be unlinked: Once you link a blog, it’s there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot.

7.  No more coupons: You are no longer allowed to send coupons.

8.  Shop closed: Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better. We’ll communicate more details nearer the time.

We really do believe that an economy with plenty of 3rd parties involved is a stronger economy overall, unfortunately just right now we’re unable to support that given the need to keep everything running. We hope that, by taking the steps we have, we will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for our users and getting the revenue we need to pay the bills and expand the service. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll be in a stronger position with a more diverse income and we’ll be able to reintroduce independent credit sales and unfettered credit transfers among members.

We appreciate all the feedback we’ve had over the past few days on this topic, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our blog post here: http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=555

Thanks for standing by us while we make these important changes, and know that these changes will allow us to continue to make available to you the great Entrecard service that brings you more traffic, comments, and subscribers and better rankings.
</blockquote>

So there you have it for today. My “duh” math moment (still shaking my head I didn’t use a calculator LOL) and the latest economic changes within Entrecard.

Hopefully more as the week progresses - good news I’m hoping and tactics and strategies for internet marketing and social media uses.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Random Rants, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Strategies, advertising, blogging, economics, internet marketing, u.s. citizens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.