> My experience with donations ... about 0.5% earnings of income via ads.
So, to put it another way, you've made 200 times more (not just 200%) by advertising than by donation? For example, if you had received $25 in donations, then your ad revenue should be about $5,000.
df-offical has an unfortunately dead comment with some interesting and similar numbers:
> Ad-earnings in December 2014: $700, Affiliate Earnings: $200, Donations: $25.
So that would put them at $700/$25 = 28 times more (36 times more if you include Affiliate Earnings). There's an order of magnitude difference between your earnings:donations ratio and df-offical's ratio, but advertising income is definitely the greater share of the two.
I would say that was my experience with donations too.
I had a site or side-project (featured on Techcrunch, Lifehacker, etc) but only made $40 in donations in it's entire lifetime. It was a small winamp/itunes/kmplayer plugin so I didn't expect a lot of donations but with nearly 500K installs that is a very very small number.
P.S. I never pestered my users for donation though. Never even optimized the donate button or anything like what I do with my business sites since that I made for fun purposes only on a weekend.
So, to put it another way, you've made 200 times more (not just 200%) by advertising than by donation? For example, if you had received $25 in donations, then your ad revenue should be about $5,000.
df-offical has an unfortunately dead comment with some interesting and similar numbers:
> Ad-earnings in December 2014: $700, Affiliate Earnings: $200, Donations: $25.
So that would put them at $700/$25 = 28 times more (36 times more if you include Affiliate Earnings). There's an order of magnitude difference between your earnings:donations ratio and df-offical's ratio, but advertising income is definitely the greater share of the two.