

What I learned by switching to Bitcoin donations instead of traditional ads - astrowilliam

6 days ago I posted  http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Bitcoin&#x2F;comments&#x2F;202pts&#x2F;im_taking_the_ads_off_my_popular_website_and&#x2F; ) about taking all the ads off my website ( http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaceindustrynews.com ) and replacing them with donation links for BTC. I plan on doing this for 6 months and at that time if I&#x27;m not making enough money to keep the servers up I&#x27;ll have to switch back to a traditional model.<p>Here&#x27;s a recap of what has happened and what I&#x27;ve learned so far from my experience.<p>I&#x27;ve received some very positive feedback about my move away from traditional advertising to a donation based format. I&#x27;ve been contacted by numerous people in the industry ( NASA, etc. ) about this. They are truly intrigued and didn&#x27;t really understand how I was going to keep the lights on.<p>The BTC community has been overwhelmingly supportive through this transition as well. I&#x27;ve gotten so many PMs from people that have built systems for easier BTC integration and I&#x27;m truly grateful for that.<p>How much BTC has been donated so far?
Day 1: I received 0.0125 BTC which equals ~ $8.00 USD.
Day 2: 0.0015 BTC = ~ $0.95 USD
Day 3: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD
Day 4: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD
Day 5: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD
Day 6: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD<p>There are probably a few reasons for this. One is that after the initial post moved down the page less BTC influencers were coming to the site. My normal audience comes from links and Google so who knows if they user BTC at all.<p>This news doesn&#x27;t halt me one bit. I&#x27;m in this for a while and will continue doing what is right and what is good.
Like I said before, this is still only a few days old so there will be design changes, traffic changes. I&#x27;m still 100% behind BTC!<p>Thank you for the donations, I really do appreciate it.
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patio11
You should strongly consider making a product and selling it, then using
spaceindustrynews.com as a friendcatcher for that product. This lets you have
a virtually ad-free experience for that site (with the exception of a few
plugs for the house product every once in a while), and would probably be
substantially more lucrative than donations or webmaster welfare (AdWords in a
non-commercial niche). It will likely sell to a fraction of a percent of your
audience, but given that rather more than that is people with high-paying jobs
in e.g. engineering or the space industry, amounts of money which are
lifechanging for you (when aggregated) are still pretty small beer for them.

~~~
astrowilliam
I've thought of this a million times over but really can't think of something
that would be worthwhile to my readers that they can't get elsewhere. Of
course I could do the normal swag, tshirts, etc. , but that's pretty boring
and doesn't add to the user experience.

~~~
drewblaisdell
Charge $0.99-$1.99 for an iOS app that pulls content from your website and
presents it in a mobile-friendly view. Advertise this app on your website as
both a way to read your site on a phone and a way to support your website
monetarily.

~~~
astrowilliam
Great idea. I can probably whip up an iOS app for that. Sounds like a weekend
project :)Thanks!

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alain94040
Sounds like the trend, starting on day 3, is quite clear. It's not surprising,
donations usually don't work.

~~~
astrowilliam
There's a way. I will find it. The content is worth not having ads.

~~~
socceroos
I really appreciate your attitude! Hope it goes well for you, mate. =)

~~~
astrowilliam
Thanks for the encouragement, it means a lot :)

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nwh
One thing, it's impossible to see the footer on your website with the infinite
scrolling.

~~~
typicalbender
It looks like the infinite scroll only loads two times and then has a button
to "load more" on the third time. Infinite scroll with a footer is generally a
bad idea though. I would suggest either using a sticky footer so it's always
at the bottom or moving the information to someplace that wont be moved by the
infinite scroll.

That being said this will definitely be an interesting experiment and I look
forward to seeing the results in 6 months.

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Detrus
What did the site look like with ads?

Have you considered making ads less intrusive? There are networks like this
[http://decknetwork.net](http://decknetwork.net) that stipulate one small jpg
ad per page.

Where do you get the content? Do you write any yourself? This looks like an
aggregator/content farm. Why should I support that?

Coinbase allows recurring payments, you can ask people to subscribe
essentially.

Ultimately I don't think it's very convenient for a large number of visitors,
but you can probably get your $20 a day. Flattr was supposed to be
micropayments for likes and it didn't work. With Bitcoin/DOGE there is a more
passionate crowd that will donate if only to promote bitcoin and increase
transaction volume.

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anigbrowl
I'm not any the wiser, as you don't mention what your average ad revenue is
like.

~~~
astrowilliam
On any given day my ad revenue is around $20.00USD. It pays the bills and then
some at the end of the month. Sorry about not mentioning that.

~~~
kristianp
I would suggest adding a Paypal (or similar) donation button as well, so non-
bitcoin people, or those who wish to hold theirs, can donate too.

~~~
astrowilliam
Thank you for your suggestion. I've added PayPal to the mix. Though I feel
that BTC is the future of currency I'm not sure everyone will feel the same
way.

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arn
This is a marketing plan, not a business plan.

Accept other forms of payment. If you feel strongly about Bitcoin, that's
great. Accept it as a payment form. Advertise to all bitcoin savvy users. But
you are destining yourself to fail by only accepting Bitcoin.

Also, not sure your readership. But it probably makes more sense to do a
subscription, cause someone that sends you a few dollars won't likely send you
more. And your regulars are the ones who will pay. Not the random-google-
passer-by.

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Zenst
Whilst a interesting move I would suggest offering donations via alternative
means, PAYPAL, postal cheque even being two that spring to mind. Have a donate
button that links to the options. Then you will get a better feel of how the
donation model works instead of limiting to bitcoins. Which in some countries
would be illegal I believe. Not sure what the geographic distrabution of
bitcoins is, or if that information is mineable in any way beyond maybe
memberlists from mining pools.

~~~
zyxley
This is the first thing I thought. Given the mild but noticeable hassle of
converting USD to BTC, and the position of BTC in the eyes of many ("hang on
to all of it, the value will keep going up!"), there may be potential impulse
donators who just won't do it in Bitcoin.

Actually, I wonder what sort of income there'd be with a "joke money"
cryptocurrency with an associated tipping culture, like Dogecoin.

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Xcelerate
I'm developing a new service (Bitcoin related). At first I was considering BTC
donations being the only form of income, but I've noticed every time I look up
a BTC donation address there's little to no money transferred to it, even for
popular websites. I think I'm going to use a percentage of each transaction as
payment instead...

~~~
ninguem2
The game 2048 which was on the front page a few days ago got a lot of
donations.

~~~
bdcravens
Was on the front page for a while, and yet, only 0.47 BTC donated: (unless
they used more than one address since then)

[https://blockchain.info/address/1Ec6onfsQmoP9kkL3zkpB6c5sA4P...](https://blockchain.info/address/1Ec6onfsQmoP9kkL3zkpB6c5sA4PVcXU2i)

That's no more than a day of income for a so-so developer (in the US, at
least), so I'd hardly call that "a lot of donations". You could earn more on a
low-grade task on Freelancer.com or eLance, and I consider 2048 a quality
piece of work. The popularity has probably peaked, so I doubt it'll ever even
get to 1.0 BTC.

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sixQuarks
Thanks for sharing the results so far. The problem with accepting bitcoin on a
site that doesn't have anything to do with bitcoin, is that you're limiting
your audience.

I would venture that only 1 - 5% of your visitors even have bitcoin. So
basically, you're trying to get donations from only 10 to 50 users for every
1,000 visitors you get. If we then assume that 1% of those visitors will
donate $1, you are looking at only $1 to $5 for every 10,000 visitors.

This just doesn't make sense from a business perspective. I would include
other ways to make donations.

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bmm6o
I hope this works out for you. I'd really like to see micro-transactions
replace advertizing as the primary revenue source of the web. I'm afraid your
experience so far shows that we haven't reached that tipping point yet. What
percentage of your audience even has any bitcoin to donate? It has to be 1000
times more frictionless before I see this working outside of a niche (that you
don't seem to be in).

Good luck.

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quaffapint
While way too many websites have turned advertising into something 'bad', it
doesn't have to be that way. Sites like Smashing Magazine and such offer non-
intrusive advertising that displays services people might want to use.

Advertising in and of itself is not evil, it's how people have chosen to
utilize it that's given it a bad rap.

~~~
nfoz
I do consider advertising in and of itself to be distasteful. But of course
some implementations are better than others, and yes many people are ok with
some types/amounts.

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dlwiest
Have you considered adding dogecoin and/or litecoin? The inflationary nature
of dogecoin lends itself to a higher transaction volume than bitcoin, whereas
bitcoin inherently encourages hoarding, not to mention the overwhelmingly
generous nature of the dogecoin community in general.

~~~
astrowilliam
Doge seems like a good idea. I have reached out to that community on Reddit to
see what they think and they seem very enthusiastic.

The problem with Dogecoin is that I can't find anything relatively close to
coinbase.com as a wallet.

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quackerhacker
Makes me really hopeful for Tidbit to succeed and become more widely adopted
and accepted...I know that I plan to implement it on my sites (default off
with opt in of course).

[http://tidbit.co.in](http://tidbit.co.in)

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j_s
I recommend supporting other cryptocurrencies, particularly dogecoin.

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joshdance
Good luck. Thank you for sharing!

~~~
astrowilliam
Thanks Josh!

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command_line
This is one of the primary purposes for developing valME.io - to give quality
content providers a better way to make money from doing exactly what they
already do, and without advertising. You can read about the details here:
[http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-
works/](http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works/) and the
genesis of the idea here: [http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/pkqqs/the-
genesis-of-va...](http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/pkqqs/the-genesis-of-
valme-io-what-were-you-thinking/). We would welcome your content and be happy
to give you a free community called /SpaceIndustryNews (or whatever you want
to call it). If you're interested, when you register, just indicate it's you.

