

I took ads off my website in favor of Bitcoin donations - astrowilliam
http://www.ionthesky.com/took-ads-website-12-days-ago-favor-bitcoin-donations-numbers-far/

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Zenst
Nice to get an update and I'm sure many will be watching this as thinking
along the same lines.

Still early days, but does appear to be somewhat lacklustre in donations.

May be a case of offering banner ad's and the option to not have them if you
donate and thus get the best of both worlds with the incentive to donate
giving a clear result/return over the warm fuzzy feeling.

I will be interested in how it goes after 40 days and with that catch the
monethly pay-day cycle of the audience as like many, it is a factor.

Personaly I do not have any bitcoins nor ever had a paypal account, and with
that I've always mindful of banner ads and do make the effort to click and
explore the adverts on sites. Well elast the non introsive ones that do not
splurge you with video's and audio, but thats just my personal taste on a low
bandwith network connection.

I do hope that the site gets that balance right without jepodising
revenue/running costs. Brave move and have to respect that.

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astrowilliam
Thank you, I appreciate the kind words. And yes, I know the audience is very
small right now but I believe in time that will change. I'm not sure if I've
"jumped the gun" and acted too quickly, but this experiment is worth the
effort and time to see if it will actually work.

I'm excited to see what happens in the next 10 days, let alone 40 days.

The reason why I've opted for showing no banner ads is because I don't think
that the sharing of information should be diluted with outside influences. I
have made plenty of money with banner ads in the past and I know with the
right audience and the right amount of traffic you can make a killing. But,
that's why I'm doing this site. I'm doing it for my love of science and the
cosmos.

Thanks again.

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computer
So it seems that the business model being evaluated here is to replace ads by
bitcoin donation buttons, and then promote the fact that you've done that to
pro-bitcoin audiences in the hopes that they donate.

That's fine, but the conclusions won't generalize to blogs in general.

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astrowilliam
I agree with you. Blogs and news sites have to find the right revenue stream
for their audience. Mine might be donations. It might also be banner ads. I'm
not exactly sure yet, so that's why I'm doing this experiment.

