Entrecard.com, to sell or not to sell

Written on 28th September 2008                                                                                                              14 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web

Written by Mircea Goia

It seems it’s the end of the road for Entrecard…or maybe not. It depends on who is buying it and what it does after that, since the site is listed on sale on Sitepoint Marketplace since September 25.

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 shows something else.

Entrecard has over 1 million visitors a month – and that’s only from USA. Now, I wonder who’s right, knowing that Compete or Alexa numbers are not that accurate.

The 11th hour

Entrecard founder Graham Langdon mentions the reason he sells on Sitepoint:

I am selling because I have come to a stalemate. Entrecard is growing fast, but I do not have the resources to put behind it. I recently met extensively with Venture Capitalists who were going to make a 700k seed investment and a 2-5m follow on Series A investment in 6 months. The deal fell through in the 11th hour, right before the terms sheet, because they lost faith in my ability to execute the plan after a series of tests in which I did not know I was being tested. The valuation we were discussing was 8 million. We were going to open a headquarters, hire 10 people, and go straight to the top. Then it fell apart, and after getting my hopes up, I just haven’t been able to get back on my feet. I’m a wreck and feeling like a failure to come so close only to drop it due to my idiocy.
I also received an Angel investment several months ago at a valuation of $500,000. The network has more than tripled in size since I received that small investment. Month after month the growth rate just increases.

The sale price is a minimum $100,000 and the bid ends soon. Any takers? (auction ends in 16 hours after the time of writing this article)

Publicity stunt?

I am not sure why the founder couldn’t find another investor for the site. I mean, if Compete is correct, some investors have to be interested. Maybe Langdon should give it another chance and not have his hopes ruined after one failure (although he has family problems as well, says his blog). He also founded the Million Dollar Wiki project (buy a wiki page for $100), an Alex Tew’s MillionDollarHomepage copycat. He obviously knows how to work the media, so this could be a publicity stunt (saying to sell the site, media talks, he gets a publicity boost and then he changes his mind).

Graham managed to make $123,000 from MillionDollarWiki so far and he wanted also to sell this site on Sitepoint to finance his new project, Entrecard. But it seems he wasn’t lucky. The price he wanted wasn’t met so probably he didn’t sell.

Update: I just spoke with Langdon and he told me he changed his mind and won’t sell. That’s good because Entrecard has a future and he should be the one who should fullfill it. I always agreed that who started something (a company in this case) should finish it (head it to success). Hopefully, he will be up to this task and I wish him all the best.