Entrecard: The Good and The Bad

Introduction
On Tuesday I learned about and signed up to a new link exchange service called Entrecard. Entrecard is a new program from the same guy that launched the One Million Dollar Wiki and has been generating a lot of buzz around the blogosphere. Entrecard is like a business card swapping service where you create your virtual business card with your website’s logo and you “drop” your card at others websites that are using Entrecard. By dropping your card at other websites, you receive credit with which you can purchase advertising on other website. As a member of Entrecard, you also receive credits whenever people drop their cards at your website.

The Good
Shortly after joining, I immediately began receiving traffic and offers from advertisers to advertise on my website. This makes sense because I was the new kid on the block and ads on my site were very cheap (credit-wise…there’s no money exchange going on w/ Entrecard). Additionally, these new visitors left some positive comments on my posts and made me feel good about my site (awwww). Thirdly, all this new traffic helped me to almost top my 1-day visitor record of 83. I got 78 hits yesterday thanks to Entrecard and its influx of traffic. And did I mention that Entrecard is free? To join, click on the button “Get one!” on the right sidebar.
The Bad
With every good thing comes a bad thing. After analyzing my logs, I noticed that most of my new visitors stayed on for an average of 24 seconds. Just long enough for the site to load and for them to find the Entrecard button so they could give themselves credit for dropping off their card.
It seems to me that it’s fairly easy to game the system by clicking on each advertiser daily. You gain enough credits to place your ads on the big name sites like John Chow or Problogger without having to spend a dime.
Conclusion
I’m going to say that it’s too early to tell if Entrecard is good or bad. I know that it is good AND bad, but I don’t think that it’s decisively one OR the other. The influx of traffic is nice for the stats, but if these new visitors aren’t reading my posts, signing up for the RSS feed, or clicking on my links then I don’t know if I should bother using this service. I have a few ads running in the next few days through Entrecard so I’ll see how that turns out for me. In the meantime, I guess it’s a hung jury.