

Ask HN: How successful have donations been with your site? - adrianwaj

I was wondering about placing a tip or donation box on my site. I'd rather not as I'm a minimalist, but still, it may be worth it. How successful have you been in using one, and what system do you use?
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patio11
The only person I've ever heard of really hit the ball out of the park with
donations is Rick Brewster (Paint.NET). He has some interesting blog articles
about the subject which Google will bring up.

[http://blog.getpaint.net/2007/07/13/making-money-with-
freewa...](http://blog.getpaint.net/2007/07/13/making-money-with-freeware-
tip-1-have-a-donate-button/)

More typical is SyntaxHighlighter, which is the JS syntax highlighting thing
that everyone and their dog uses on their blog. The author has raised about
$100 in donations so far (number pulled off site). I'm one quarter of that,
because his software saved me so much work I donated the USD equivalent of one
sale of my software to him. Since he started accepting donations his software
has been, conservatively, downloaded several hundred thousand times by people
who use it to increase their commercial and professional opportunities.

Compare that to commercial software for a moment: I sell about a hundred
dollars worth of licenses to my bingo thingee a day, on rather substantially
less than several hundred thousand installs.

Which is a long way to say "Charge money for value".

(Relatedly, I am reminded of a good line I heard from a developmental
economist once: Only one country ever got rich from foreign aid, and the
Vatican is not a great model for Africa.)

~~~
adrianwaj
You could say "if you're offering a lot to a lot of people" then donations
might work. At the same time you could be charging as well, and even though
this adds complexity, it also adds a business. Charging does reduce popularity
in the short term and chances of going viral.

I suppose it's generally the most altruistic that give a to a website. It's
not like you're curing diseases or saving lives, generally.

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wensing
Stormpulse.com received a few $k in donations in September '08 (during Gustav,
Ike, and co). We slapped up a "Donate Now" PayPal button in the top-right-hand
corner and it worked. The benefit of PayPal over others is the fact that
PayPal is an actual payment, not just a pledge to pay (which can be the case
with other donation widgets).

Word to the wise: be smart about minimums and maximums. If you ask for a
dollar, you get a dollar. Ask for $20, or make it completely open, and you
might get more. There's obviously a psychology to it worth studying.

That said, donations are not our revenue model, so we've taken the button
down. :-)

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acro
Bay12 Games (Tarn Adams) has been somewhat successful with donations, I think
he works now full-time on his own stuff. (<http://www.bay12games.com/>)

From their forums:

March Donations: $2997.46 and 50 billion dollars in expired bank notes from
Zimbabwe February Donations: $1428.62 January Donations: $2099.48 December
Donations: $5279.49 November Donations: $1305.10

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wlievens
In its first few years, my webgame had donations flowing in at the rate of
about 50 cent per active player-year. By that I mean, a population of 100
active players (active means using the website at least once per week) would
result in some 50 dollars per year. It's a lot less now due to less activity
on my part. This is in the same order of magnitude as adsense, except that
adsense depends less on "fresh" users.

This is all small numbers though, since my game inherently doesn't scale.

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knightinblue
Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com) and Leo Babauta (www.zenhabits.net) are
the 2 who come to mind when talking about making money from donations. Leo
actually makes enough to have quit his day job (last I heard).

According to them, you need 2 things to make this work - 1) steady regular
audience 2) they have to really like you or at least what you have to say

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ivankirigin
Tipjoy has been mentioned a few times. Let me just say that we're most excited
about our API, because it can give a site a really custom donation form
integration. Broadcasting over twitter is really hot too.

<http://tipjoy.com/api>

We're holding an API contest too, and I'd love to see plugins into web
frameworks to make donations built into the site.
<http://tipjoy.com/APIcontest>

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alain94040
Donations are no substitute for charging for products. If you have a
commercial product and you make it free and ask for donations instead, your
income will drop by 10X or 100X. Really!

Where donations work is when there is an obvious good cause attached to the
donation. People will donate when it feels right. But getting a product is not
a cause for donation.

tipjoy of course is the rolls royce of donations for your web site. Can't get
any simpler than that, and simplicity is key.

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radu_floricica
Donations won't work until we have a workable micropayment system. And I don't
understand why we don't have it yet. The software is something to write in a
weekend: deposit at most $50 in your account, pay by clicking a link and
confirm by email. 1 cent per transaction should cover operating costs.
Transfers from your account could cost a bit more, to cover bank fees and
profit.

Why we don't have it yet? I'd guess regulations. The moment you write this
software you're more or less a bank. If someone found a way to circumvent this
would make the internet a huge favor.

~~~
teej
I don't understand your argument at all. I've made donations of thousands of
dollars, tax deductible and not, online. Lowering the bar for payment can only
go so far. It doesn't solve the issue that getting people to open their
wallets (virtual or otherwise) is a pain in the ass. It's a psychological
problem, one that most people solve by requiring payment upfront, instead of
passively hinting to have money thrown their way.

Personally, I hate the idea of "donations" in this sense. I would rather
support your work/ideas/project by purchasing a product you profit from, than
just hand you cash.

~~~
radu_floricica
Exactly, it's a psychological problem. When opening your wallet means
searching for your credit card number, you probably won't. When it means 2
clicks and 2 key presses, then maybe it's different.

------
flipbrad
anyone here using tipjoy? had any success with it?

~~~
wensing
Given how easy it is to setup, giving Tipjoy a shot is a worthwhile
experiment.

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vaksel
I think Wikipedia is the only site that makes some real money from donations

