The news of the day for bloggers who use the Entrecard system for blog promotion is that Entrecard is going to start allowing advertisers to pay for ads on blogs in the network.  Even more to the point, it allows bloggers to cash out their credits.  The only stipulation that Entrecard puts on bloggers is that the Entrecard widget must be above the fold (although this standard might be relaxed).

This might just be a good move by Graham to get his lagging blog promotion system back up and going.  Or not.

Here are the pros and cons as I see them.

Pros for Entrecarders:

• You now have network to make money from their ads, and this one is one of the easiest to learn and manage.
• All Entrecard widgets will have to be displayed above the fold (although per the comments on the blog entry, EC management might relax this standard).
• Popularity on the Entrecard network might actually be worth something.

Cons for Entrecarders:

• This actually hurts those bloggers who are doing this solely to promote their own blogs.  They’ll only get a minimum of 50% of the impressions on the most popular sites.
• Having “paid ads” might be a violation of TOS with other networks that you belong to (i.e, blogher and today.com).
• To reject a paying ad, you’ll have to pay a credit fee.
• You have to give up some creative control over the look of your site to place the widget within the designated area.
• The price per credit will be adjustable based on a yet to be determined supply-demand curve.

Pros for Advertisers:

• If your product appeals to bloggers, you have an audience that is used to clicking through to get credits.  Your click through rate on Entrecard ads will be much higher than most networks.

Cons for Advertisers:

• For most Entrecard sites, Entrecard users make up 99% of their traffic.  As a result, the same users cycle through the same blogs (i.e., no new traffic after the first pass).
• Entrecard users are quite industrious when it comes to getting credits quickly.  It isn’t clear that the clickthrough you’re getting will actually get your landing page a good look.
• Most Entrecard users are more interested in earning credits than writing content.
• The demographics of Entrecard are at best “scattered”.  At first, it might be difficult to know exactly who these bloggers are and who their audience is.
• Entrecard is entering a new field.  Their management has had a lot of execution issues in the past.