Over a week ago. Entercard, the blog traffic exchange Widget Badge was put itself for sale in the Sitepoint Marketplace for a minimum price of $100,000.

Mircea Goia at TheNextWeb blog wrote about it puzzled by the why someone would sell entrecard instead of invest on it more. why puzzled?. because entrecard is doing quite well:

Entrecard was basically founded as a traffic exchange service for bloggers (English language only). It launched 11 months ago and now it has about 20,000 blogs in its network delivering about 80 million impressions a month. The core product is the widget network, which serves 125×125 advertising across 56 vertical channels in the blogosphere. They also developed a Firefox toolbar used by our bloggers/publishers to visit other sites, purchase advertising, and pack the power of the site into the browser. This toolbar is used by 7000 bloggers so they claim.

According to Sitepoint’s post Entrecard has about 85,000 unique visitors a month (growing at a rate of 18%/month – no marketing) and 3,25 million pageviews/month. But Compete.com showssomething else.

So, it don`t matter if compete numbers are not entirely accurate. if you got a growth graphic like that one.  you don`t just sell right?. Right!. Graham Langdon (Entrecard owner) retreated from the idea and now says it is more committed to it than before.

Not only that but now they are looking to hire a Content Correspondant, came up with a serious update to their business model and also announced a Partnership with OIO Publishing for Blog Advertising..

That means it went from looking for a quick exit for as low as 100k to get some serious boost in less than one week. now it could be worth as much as 1 million dlls based on those simple changes. quite fishy. but if it was indeed marketing it was a wildcard. using it once and in the way it was used was pretty smart. as with most wildcards. you only get to use them once. so even if Entrecard would end up for sale next year. now it is obvious it would be able to get as much as 1 million. this is not the first time a Startup does that trick. but it is the first time for a widget startup as far as i can remember.

I do like Entrecard because it is simple and it is not a heavy widget to put. so it does represent one of the best  Blog Traffic Exchange options currently present for Bloggers.

Entrecard