One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet.
I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?
They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
For the last 10 years or so I've been running a free-to-use Morse Code online radio thing. It has cost me about $1000 to host so far, and has a couple of hundred DAUs.
The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests.
So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2.
I posted that pledge to the site a year ago. Total donations: $80.
There are a couple of hundred people who use the site for hours per day and post on the forums that they love it, but haven't donated a fiver.
So, a couple months ago, I started using a site for a game I play that provides maps, info on items in the game, current prices for the global market that players can trade on, etc. You can link it to your Patreon account, and if you're a patron for $5/mo, the site gives you historical data on the market, and a few other useful features for the game. There's also a Discord for updates, features requests, general dev stuff, etc, and that's gated (or some channels are at least) behind Patreon as well because Patreon integrates well with Discord, so support and feature requests (through Discord) come from subscribers that are paying.
I mention this because at the current moment, he has 4,757 patrons, and that $5/mo is the only official tier offered. That's $19k/mo, minus Patreon fees. This is the first time I've used a Patreon subscription to power a site account, which I wasn't aware could be done (I subscribe to a few web authors though, so I'm not new to Patreon). I think this is a really interesting way to provide gated site access, and it's fairly low fiction for a lot of people, because they either already use Patreon, or have at least heard of it so it's not some random site charging you or that you are paying. There's lots of benefits I see to this model, and I think if I have a project that fits it in the near future I'll try it myself. Maybe it's something that would work for you (you'd have to set the monthly price at something you think appropriate). $1 from 100 people would get you that $1000 in less than a year, and you might also get better targeted info on what features the people that are willing to pay think are more important.
I agree asking for donations doesn't work. I don't like donating like that. I am willing to allocate a bit of monthly money to people if I feel like I'm getting something worthwhile in return though (it's a limited amount, I try to keep total Patreon expenditure at or below ~$50/mo).
You are correct that asking for donations doesn't work.
If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for money. Good luck with that.
If you position it as tips and payment for the value you deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick.
But there are people who are successfully supporting their work with Patreon and tips as at least part of the scheme.
It takes work to get money out of people. You probably didn't do anywhere near enough to promote the idea that "We need X more money to release version 2." And you probably positioned the request for money very poorly.
Just because you didn't pull it off doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Not to criticize you in any way, but I've found that asking me for financial support works in some cases and those are because I felt the "humanness" of the creator. I remember this author that put up a video of her unboxing first batch of her newly released book (and being excited about it). The person went from a name on a webpage or face in a video to a human being immediately (in my mind). I don't really have the words to precisely describe what I mean.
I think part of the problem may be that you're still far from the goal. If I were a heavy user, I might consider donating $50. But there's a huge risk that you won't get to $1,000 and my money will be "wasted" (not wasted, but not bringing about the desired effect either). Because of that, I'm inclined not to do it. It seems to me like you've got a chicken and egg problem here.
I agree with your assessment that donations do not work.
Now let me solve your problem: Instead of running into the tragedy of the commons by asking your userbase collectively to donate 1k, you can announce that you will start working on v2 now and let users pay to prioritize individual feature requests in each new release. Start with a small release adding only a feature that you want but nobody else requested to prove that the project is active again. Create scarcity by only doing 1 release / timeframe and only include the feature with the most money pledged. Hope for a bidding war.
Three years ago, I built an offline/online paper wallet generator[0] for what was one of the top cryptocurrencies by market cap (Stellar Lumens - XLM). I included a donation address in the footer of the page.
I've received 9 donations in those three years[1], amounting to about 12 XLM (currently $4.87). While not much, I get a kick out of the idea that 9 people liked it enough to donate.
Note, my costs are negligible and I've never received a single feature request or had to do any maintenance. The code is hosted at GitHub Pages (free) with Cloudflare (free) in front of it. The only cost to me is the domain name.
I run a telegram bot that has a pretty large user base completely for free. I have a buy me a coffee setup for it and it gets almost zero views, except for when a feature breaks. When a feature breaks all the sudden buy me a coffee gets traffic and I start getting donations.
Really odd to think that if everything worked perfectly all the time I wouldn't have made any money on this project.
Don't call them donations. Look at what reddit did: people can "give gold" to people for comments that they think were great. All it does is add some icon to a comment and put the person in a "gold club".
In games, people will buy so many visual improvements that add nothing but glam to their character.
Discord does... something, I can't remember what exactly, with their "turbo" and IIRC it costs discord cents, but the user pays dollars.
People will pay for the dumbest things. Give them a reason to sign up, add some kind of paid interaction that changes something visual or makes a dumb sound, add some tier system with context relevant names, and people might really pay.
Depends. I have paid for things I could have gotten for free, and raised money for political organisations (not in the USA, so we could not sell laws the way the Americans do).
The best way to get money is to ask. There is a lot of research into the best ways to ask, and what gives best results.
But just asking thoughtlessly (not accusing you, no idea how you asked) does not work
Have you considered some sort of conditional pledging system?
That was part of the original allure of Kickstarter: participants agreed to contribute money -- but they only had to pay it if the total pledged amount reached a certain threshold. That way, contributors got some assurance that they're not wasting their money and that any project they fund has some level of viability.
So maybe, in your case, you could ask the users to donate some amount of money -- but they wouldn't have to actually pay it unless you reached your $1,000 funding goal.
Have you tried Patreon? I had the same experience with a donation button. But a Patreon button magically gave us steady money to support infrastructure.
This was my experience too, with a useful online page I built. People loved it but wouldn’t donate to help it.
Someone suggested I productise it but I thought, based on the donations, that it wouldn’t have many purchasers. But they were right: it earned orders of magnitude more when some features required a one time payment to be unlocked, versus donation.
I don't know, I always feel like there has to be some reward to incentivize people, even if it's dead simple.
Like, you can choose to have your name publicly displayed on a thank you page (this would work well with BMAC, since donations can be both anonymous and not), or have your username be of different colour or have some badge next to it.
But then again, I don't know how I would fit that into this meme page, and I'm definitely not an expert having earned a total of two euros of donations (yet to implement some reward system).
I made a campsite alert website to send you an email and text message when a campsite becomes available so you can book it. I put up a buy me a coffee page and in a month, had over $500 in donations.
I can confirm. I get 1-2 donation for every 50,000 visitors. It doesn't even cover for the time I spend answering their emails. There's a donation prompt at the end of my email answers. Those are people who start their emails by saying how valuable the service was to them.
Donations are about 1% of my income. They are a complete waste of time.
It can work. It just depends on how strong your community is.
When I lived in Houston, I was a member of a local discussion forum that was on a .info domain. One day, a domain squatter offered to sell the .com version to the sysop for $15,000. The regular users pitched in, and got the money together in a few weeks.
Asking for donations works if you're also an active member of the community you've created.
People donated over $130k to Tarn and Zach Adams in 2020 (creators of Dwarf Fortress). Upon saying that, that's their sole source of income. I think a lot of players are aware that if they don't donate, Dwarf Fortress will never be finished. Well, it never will anyway but...
But Tarn actively gives updates on his work, creates podcasts, and participates in the forum, and has been doing that for more than a decade. I'm not sure if he still does it, but if you donated, he'd draw you a picture and send it to you in the post. I've still got mine from 10 years ago.
I feel like this is partly, if not mostly, a facilitation issue with the payment itself.
I signed up for Patreon to support one member, but its so easy to add/remove people to the monthly dole that I’m now up to $40/mo. I know you’re not asking for advice here but maybe something like that would be worth a shot if you haven’t tried already.
(I know that clientele though, so maybe Patreon isn’t the best route lol)
Maybe your work would be better positioned for a grant of some kind. Is there a membership organization that many radio people belong to and pay dues? They'd possibly have the funds to make improvements to the ecosystem.
>They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be $$$rich$$$" and they proceed to find out that there are smaller percentiles than %1.
To receive donations people need to be sympathetic to you or your cause. You need to actively sell it, making it a considerable part of the user experience.
It's really hard to build that relationship with just one visit. Maybe there are visitors deeply invested in the situation and they may actually obsess with your product but you need to look into the analytics to see if it's the case. If there are visitors that appear to be visiting extremely frequently, you need to explore ways to ask for the money and for that you will need data(profiles of the visitors) to develop your message however the OP doesn't do detailed analytics and profiling. It could be possible to monetise it and even catch a few whales but chances are that you can also alienate those people with the wrong messaging, so you probably will need to do personalisation which requires data and cookies and what not, which means data collection and sharing permission popups.
Of course you can try your chances and pick a group of people that you believe are using your product and proceed with A/B testing etc instead of profiling. If you happen to choose the privacy nerds as a target you will find out how much the privacy nerds like donating.
Who would pay $1 for getting a chuckle out of a meme? Also 50 million views is not 50 million visitors. If he had a normal ad monetization channel in place, he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM and walked away with at least $5k from his 15 minutes of fame. The problem is that learning as you go makes it a little too late to monetize the peak. There are companies whose entire business is in pumping out viral sites like this. Some explode for a a little while and others never make a penny. You can bet your butt that in the hands of someone who does this professionally these 50 million views would have been thousands and thousands of dollars.
> he should have easily been able to garnish a minimum of a 10 cent CPM
Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.
Reddit gold seems to fit here. It makes no sense to me but it seems to be working. I find it funny the threads complaining about Reddit's recent horrible hiring an mod decisions all had TONS of gold lol
I would, particularly if the blurb was very honest (or very creative). I have no trouble throwing someone even a one-time $5 if the website is funny enough.
If my developer tool with thousands of stars on GitHub generates $15/yr in donations, I would say 0.01% of visitors each donating $1 to a website they on average spend 1 minute or less on (seems a reasonable assumption?) is far too optimistic.
Can you give any other metric for its popularity? Stars aren't a good one - Github stars are bookmarks, not a reflection of whether one actually uses a given repository. Personally, I have 301 starred repositories, of which I maybe use... 5?
The conventional wisdom on the internet, often backed by common experience, is that significantly less than 0.01% of visitors leave a dollar. Internet donation plates are not known for producing consistent revenue.
Remember that McDonalds ice cream machine status site[1]? The guy has a buy me a coffee link right up top. I think he gets a solid stream of donations. I remember dozens per day a couple months ago.
Reverse that - how many websites do you visit, and look for a way to give them a dollar?
It just isn't how web audiences operate. I'm not saying that it is a bad idea - paying for good content could solve many problems. It just isn't where we are today.
For Bucket Brigade I ask for donations [1] which has covered about 50% of my costs so far [2]. I think how well this works depends a lot on how useful people find your site vs what your costs are?
>Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?
>They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
Currently ads are the easiest way to monetize a not-well-known web property in the short-term. Long-term you can build a brand/trust/community/etc and leverage that into patreon/donations.
> They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar
If it wasn't a simple meme website to spend 5 seconds on and never visit again, it would not have gotten 50 million views. Trying to monetize that is like squeezing blood from a stone.
I imagine that's one reason why he's posting this from a Substack domain.
I had a popular website which had 20MM views per month but made most of my money through ad banners. I tried direct sell for banners, links etc but they never materialized because you could actually pay cents on the dollar to do that through a network.
Also, one thing I learned on the website was that having 20 million views on your website does not equate to a consistent amount of money because the ads don't pay the sam e in every country.
For example, I had some ads pay $20CPM and some that paid $0.00001 because they were fillers, so I had to tweak my low fillers by signing up with local country ad networks who could provide better CPMs.
In the end, it still did not evolve into a large shift and the average was still lower, good but not great.
I think that these days, running your own website is good, you might still get 50MM views but not much income because ads are still not going to give you the best returns which is why some or more websites are shifting to a paywall. For the most time, everyone was good with ads, because that was what worked. Now it's paywalls and it will trend that way because they get the most value and a consistent payment that way (not many cancel active subscriptions over a period of time). Ads will still play significant amount of money for direct sellers like Google, Facebook, Twitter & Amazon, but not for third party sites who will have to find different ways.
There is also the upgrades to search engines and facebook/twitter etc to now keep you on their own website for everything and corner a full $$ vs paying third party websites a cut, which is why we see snippets etc in search engines and then people engage there more and click on a higher paying ad to them.
Also, there is ad-blockers, which means you are not getting any impressions on some percentage of the visitors in the first place.
> These reports aren’t just limited to the products you recommend — if someone buys anything within a 24 hour period of clicking your link, you can see, and you get commission.
Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use accounts or know the identities of users through another channel, and track outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting acquaintances this way.
To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff.
Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.
Heh, if you think that's bad... there's a certain popular "#1 Money Saving Hack", coupon-clipping browser extension (wink wink) that sees everything you buy on practically every major e-commerce site even when you didn't use one of their coupon codes.
And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD.
I think seeing all the random items is collateral damage. It can possibly be fixed (only show purchases in the category that you referred?).
As the affiliate, the insights are invaluable. Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers.
Or if you saw that they ended up purchasing essential oils, perhaps you’d want to write a post about using oil diffusers to fall asleep.
The affiliate link tracking is supposed to give you a better picture of your audience. Usually it works, but getting 50M views from every source on the internet is obviously a case where there’s no common “audience”.
No one doubts that it's useful for the people standing to make money off of this. I think the question was whether it was an invasion of the reader's privacy, who probably don't realize that the blog owner can now track their buying habits.
Why not ask people for this kind of stuff in an honest[1] way? If that doesn't work well because people rarely want to share that information, collecting without asking doesn't seem right.
[1] By "honest", I mean like a pop-up with a question or two and a clear "Not now" button. Not another cookie banners or passive collection.
> * Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers.*
If I buy a memory foam pillow from company B instead of company A then I don't want company A to know at all. If I wanted company A to know then I would tell company A why I didn't purchase its product.
Maybe it was that I didn't see company A's product. Or maybe it's because company A is a piece of garbage. Maybe it's because company A employs deceptive practices and I don't want to give company A my money.
And then what does that say about the written article? It's just metrics driven for what is the "best". It's truly a terrible system that's taken place over the last 20 years or so.
I run sites using Amazon's Associates affiliate program. I also track all outbound clicks from me site.
Luckily, Amazon scrubs any identifying info from their affiliate reports. So say I post an affiliate link to a book and then look in Google Analytics to see 50 readers clicked the link. The next day, I can log into Amazon's report and see I had 50 clicks and 30 sales of the book along with an addition sale of 40 toys, 10 movies, and 3 dildos.
However, I can't actually see which of my 50 readers bought what, if anything. Those 3 dildo purchases are completely anonymized, along with everything else. However, being told I also sold 40 toys really helps me because it lets me know I should probably start writing more about toys since that's what my readers are buying.
I'm also limited to 200 unique Amazon "tags", so I can't assign a unique tag to each of my readers to track them individually.
Create a web page of various recommendations, send it to a specific friend whose household regularly makes purchases on Amazon. Unsuspecting friend clicks on affiliate link, now you know all things they buy in the next 24 hours.
Works anywhere else where the audience can be identified, and click frequency is low.
Oh, no definitely not. Nope. There's no way that a company can see that you've purchased Some Things within the past 24 hours and definitely can't correlate those purchases with receipts. Nope that's not a thing. Definitely not. No way at all. Especially since companies aren't owned by parent companies. That would totally be impossible.
Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about how they work):
Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in the same context of what the website is showing, etc...?)
Personally as a user, I would not be against ads if they would be normal ones like in a newspaper/magazine, but many show full-fledged small&big animations => I get angry when I see my CPU usage at 100%/my fan spinning up/my battery depleting while reading on such a page, which is the main if not the only reason why I block them (I might even be interested in them, but they screw up my PC/notebook) => as a website owner do you have control on what kind of ads you want to show (technically speaking - like "animated" vs. "static", with how many fps, etc...)?
Also this part of the ads.google.com site https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ has a reasonable amount of stuff within it but obviously only from a Google point of view. I don't suppose it matters but that's the NZ version of the page, probably only the 0800 number is specific to NZ but you might change en_NZ to whatever your language code is.
> As was pointed out in a quote tweet by the Vercel CEO, the problem wasn’t Next.js at all, but the Vesselfinder embedded map taking a while to load (because everyone wanted to check the Ever Given’s status)
That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch it later to the proper map.
It's a bit of a time limited joke and not a business. If it was done as a business and ad heavy it wouldn't be shared so much.
Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself. Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been beating any ad's etc.
I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.
Good perspective. This blog post is a start. If I were him, I'd try to get my fifteen minutes in the press. Whenever a prospective employer searches his name even years in the future, they'll see "this guy made a really popular website!" That's great marketing.
Running a viral site by yourself is one of the most enjoyable feelings, like you have this big laboratory to play and test out things out with.
And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted 30 million page views per month at its peak.
Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the best.
Interestingly, according to [1] there were only ~11k visitors from Hackernews for a post on the front page that had ~1k comments. I would've estimated the visitor/comment ratio to be much, much higher.
For what it's worth (and I know this is getting extremely meta), but as it stands this writeup has had 21,963 visitors from Hacker News. (205 comments as I write this).
Users tend to overwhelmingly read headlines and skip articles. HN is not any different than the rest of the Web. Something to keep in mind here and elsewhere.
This reminds me of the toilet paper site from last year.
From no traffic to 10+ million visitors and being featured on late night talk shows. It was 6 lines of JavaScript and took 20 minutes to build but peaked at making $5,000 a day from ads.
But since then it looks like he transferred the site to someone else because now it's an e-commerce shop instead of a toilet paper calculator like it once was.
Readit News
I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?
They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
The users are not shy about feature requests, and they're not shy about complaining that I haven't implemented their feature requests.
So I made a pledge to the userbase that if they collectively donate $1000 to the site, I'll start working on v2.
I posted that pledge to the site a year ago. Total donations: $80.
There are a couple of hundred people who use the site for hours per day and post on the forums that they love it, but haven't donated a fiver.
Asking for donations doesn't work.
I mention this because at the current moment, he has 4,757 patrons, and that $5/mo is the only official tier offered. That's $19k/mo, minus Patreon fees. This is the first time I've used a Patreon subscription to power a site account, which I wasn't aware could be done (I subscribe to a few web authors though, so I'm not new to Patreon). I think this is a really interesting way to provide gated site access, and it's fairly low fiction for a lot of people, because they either already use Patreon, or have at least heard of it so it's not some random site charging you or that you are paying. There's lots of benefits I see to this model, and I think if I have a project that fits it in the near future I'll try it myself. Maybe it's something that would work for you (you'd have to set the monthly price at something you think appropriate). $1 from 100 people would get you that $1000 in less than a year, and you might also get better targeted info on what features the people that are willing to pay think are more important.
I agree asking for donations doesn't work. I don't like donating like that. I am willing to allocate a bit of monthly money to people if I feel like I'm getting something worthwhile in return though (it's a limited amount, I try to keep total Patreon expenditure at or below ~$50/mo).
If you think of it as donations and you talk about it like donations, people view you as a "charity case" begging for money. Good luck with that.
If you position it as tips and payment for the value you deliver, you can turn it into money. It's not easy, it's not consistent and it's probably not a way to get rich quick.
But there are people who are successfully supporting their work with Patreon and tips as at least part of the scheme.
It takes work to get money out of people. You probably didn't do anywhere near enough to promote the idea that "We need X more money to release version 2." And you probably positioned the request for money very poorly.
Just because you didn't pull it off doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Three years ago, I built an offline/online paper wallet generator[0] for what was one of the top cryptocurrencies by market cap (Stellar Lumens - XLM). I included a donation address in the footer of the page.
I've received 9 donations in those three years[1], amounting to about 12 XLM (currently $4.87). While not much, I get a kick out of the idea that 9 people liked it enough to donate.
Note, my costs are negligible and I've never received a single feature request or had to do any maintenance. The code is hosted at GitHub Pages (free) with Cloudflare (free) in front of it. The only cost to me is the domain name.
[0] https://stellarpaperwallet.com
[1] Cloudflare only gives me analytics for the last month but last month it had 1,348 unique visitors.
Really odd to think that if everything worked perfectly all the time I wouldn't have made any money on this project.
In games, people will buy so many visual improvements that add nothing but glam to their character.
Discord does... something, I can't remember what exactly, with their "turbo" and IIRC it costs discord cents, but the user pays dollars.
People will pay for the dumbest things. Give them a reason to sign up, add some kind of paid interaction that changes something visual or makes a dumb sound, add some tier system with context relevant names, and people might really pay.
Depends. I have paid for things I could have gotten for free, and raised money for political organisations (not in the USA, so we could not sell laws the way the Americans do).
The best way to get money is to ask. There is a lot of research into the best ways to ask, and what gives best results.
But just asking thoughtlessly (not accusing you, no idea how you asked) does not work
That was part of the original allure of Kickstarter: participants agreed to contribute money -- but they only had to pay it if the total pledged amount reached a certain threshold. That way, contributors got some assurance that they're not wasting their money and that any project they fund has some level of viability.
So maybe, in your case, you could ask the users to donate some amount of money -- but they wouldn't have to actually pay it unless you reached your $1,000 funding goal.
Someone suggested I productise it but I thought, based on the donations, that it wouldn’t have many purchasers. But they were right: it earned orders of magnitude more when some features required a one time payment to be unlocked, versus donation.
Like, you can choose to have your name publicly displayed on a thank you page (this would work well with BMAC, since donations can be both anonymous and not), or have your username be of different colour or have some badge next to it.
But then again, I don't know how I would fit that into this meme page, and I'm definitely not an expert having earned a total of two euros of donations (yet to implement some reward system).
Donations are about 1% of my income. They are a complete waste of time.
It can work. It just depends on how strong your community is.
When I lived in Houston, I was a member of a local discussion forum that was on a .info domain. One day, a domain squatter offered to sell the .com version to the sysop for $15,000. The regular users pitched in, and got the money together in a few weeks.
People donated over $130k to Tarn and Zach Adams in 2020 (creators of Dwarf Fortress). Upon saying that, that's their sole source of income. I think a lot of players are aware that if they don't donate, Dwarf Fortress will never be finished. Well, it never will anyway but...
But Tarn actively gives updates on his work, creates podcasts, and participates in the forum, and has been doing that for more than a decade. I'm not sure if he still does it, but if you donated, he'd draw you a picture and send it to you in the post. I've still got mine from 10 years ago.
Or maybe Morse Code people are just cheapskates.
I signed up for Patreon to support one member, but its so easy to add/remove people to the monthly dole that I’m now up to $40/mo. I know you’re not asking for advice here but maybe something like that would be worth a shot if you haven’t tried already.
(I know that clientele though, so maybe Patreon isn’t the best route lol)
IMHO that is a fallacy. Although %0.01 looks like a really small number there's no reason for it for not being %0.001 or %0.000001. When people do napkin math , it's a common theme to say that "If we only capture %1 of the market we would be $$$rich$$$" and they proceed to find out that there are smaller percentiles than %1.
To receive donations people need to be sympathetic to you or your cause. You need to actively sell it, making it a considerable part of the user experience.
It's really hard to build that relationship with just one visit. Maybe there are visitors deeply invested in the situation and they may actually obsess with your product but you need to look into the analytics to see if it's the case. If there are visitors that appear to be visiting extremely frequently, you need to explore ways to ask for the money and for that you will need data(profiles of the visitors) to develop your message however the OP doesn't do detailed analytics and profiling. It could be possible to monetise it and even catch a few whales but chances are that you can also alienate those people with the wrong messaging, so you probably will need to do personalisation which requires data and cookies and what not, which means data collection and sharing permission popups.
Of course you can try your chances and pick a group of people that you believe are using your product and proceed with A/B testing etc instead of profiling. If you happen to choose the privacy nerds as a target you will find out how much the privacy nerds like donating.
Email spam works exactly this way. I think what you are pointing out correctly, is that the percentage might be incorrect; the principle is not.
That sort of feels like the core issue. Why even try to monetise a page like this?
Uh, not in my experience. I haven't tried to monetize a site like this, but I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.
[1]https://mcbroken.com
0.01% is a fantasy, massively high conversion rate, just so you know.
It just isn't how web audiences operate. I'm not saying that it is a bad idea - paying for good content could solve many problems. It just isn't where we are today.
:D
You're correct, but reality doesn't agree. It has been proven time and time again that 0.01% almost always DON'T leave a dollar for anything.
But yeah 1/1000 people are not going to randomly pay for something with a market price of $0.
[1] https://echo.jefftk.com/#About
[2] https://www.jefftk.com/bucket-brigade-payments
A website I live from generates about 50€ per month in donations.
>They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.
Currently ads are the easiest way to monetize a not-well-known web property in the short-term. Long-term you can build a brand/trust/community/etc and leverage that into patreon/donations.
If it wasn't a simple meme website to spend 5 seconds on and never visit again, it would not have gotten 50 million views. Trying to monetize that is like squeezing blood from a stone.
I imagine that's one reason why he's posting this from a Substack domain.
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/s
Also, one thing I learned on the website was that having 20 million views on your website does not equate to a consistent amount of money because the ads don't pay the sam e in every country.
For example, I had some ads pay $20CPM and some that paid $0.00001 because they were fillers, so I had to tweak my low fillers by signing up with local country ad networks who could provide better CPMs.
In the end, it still did not evolve into a large shift and the average was still lower, good but not great.
I think that these days, running your own website is good, you might still get 50MM views but not much income because ads are still not going to give you the best returns which is why some or more websites are shifting to a paywall. For the most time, everyone was good with ads, because that was what worked. Now it's paywalls and it will trend that way because they get the most value and a consistent payment that way (not many cancel active subscriptions over a period of time). Ads will still play significant amount of money for direct sellers like Google, Facebook, Twitter & Amazon, but not for third party sites who will have to find different ways.
There is also the upgrades to search engines and facebook/twitter etc to now keep you on their own website for everything and corner a full $$ vs paying third party websites a cut, which is why we see snippets etc in search engines and then people engage there more and click on a higher paying ad to them.
Also, there is ad-blockers, which means you are not getting any impressions on some percentage of the visitors in the first place.
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Anyone else find this a pretty gross violation of privacy on Amazon’s part? Why should your unrelated purchases be disclosed to affiliates just because you clicked an affiliate link for whatever reason? Let’s say the affiliate website use accounts or know the identities of users through another channel, and track outbound clicks. With few enough clicks, they can exactly correlate your unrelated purchases with you, if I understand this correctly. In fact it seems you can easily prank unsuspecting acquaintances this way.
To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff.
Edit: I can also see why the data could be valuable to marketers.
And then said browser extension, which promised to never ever sell your data to a third party, got bought out by PayPal for 4 billion USD.
Really makes you think.
I guess selling the whole company owning the data isn't technically selling data to third parties...
As the affiliate, the insights are invaluable. Imagine you hosted a sleep blog and directed people to a particular memory foam pillow. If you saw they ended up purchasing a different pillow, you could change the link to better serve your readers.
Or if you saw that they ended up purchasing essential oils, perhaps you’d want to write a post about using oil diffusers to fall asleep.
The affiliate link tracking is supposed to give you a better picture of your audience. Usually it works, but getting 50M views from every source on the internet is obviously a case where there’s no common “audience”.
[1] By "honest", I mean like a pop-up with a question or two and a clear "Not now" button. Not another cookie banners or passive collection.
If I buy a memory foam pillow from company B instead of company A then I don't want company A to know at all. If I wanted company A to know then I would tell company A why I didn't purchase its product.
Maybe it was that I didn't see company A's product. Or maybe it's because company A is a piece of garbage. Maybe it's because company A employs deceptive practices and I don't want to give company A my money.
Also, imagine it's not Amazon but a much smaller website. Just bringing a client (someone who actually paid) is already a good deal.
So, I believe it's a totally fair commission rule.
> To be clear, I have no problem with affiliates getting commission on random stuff.
The problem is disclosing random purchases. You can pay a commission without that disclosure.
Luckily, Amazon scrubs any identifying info from their affiliate reports. So say I post an affiliate link to a book and then look in Google Analytics to see 50 readers clicked the link. The next day, I can log into Amazon's report and see I had 50 clicks and 30 sales of the book along with an addition sale of 40 toys, 10 movies, and 3 dildos.
However, I can't actually see which of my 50 readers bought what, if anything. Those 3 dildo purchases are completely anonymized, along with everything else. However, being told I also sold 40 toys really helps me because it lets me know I should probably start writing more about toys since that's what my readers are buying.
I'm also limited to 200 unique Amazon "tags", so I can't assign a unique tag to each of my readers to track them individually.
Works anywhere else where the audience can be identified, and click frequency is low.
/s
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Question about "Ads/advertisements" (I'm totally clueless about how they work):
Does anybody have a link pointing to some kind of overview from the point of view of a website owner? (e.g. list of different providers, amounts paid by views/clicks, which informations are/can be exchanged with them to provide for example an ad in the same context of what the website is showing, etc...?)
Personally as a user, I would not be against ads if they would be normal ones like in a newspaper/magazine, but many show full-fledged small&big animations => I get angry when I see my CPU usage at 100%/my fan spinning up/my battery depleting while reading on such a page, which is the main if not the only reason why I block them (I might even be interested in them, but they screw up my PC/notebook) => as a website owner do you have control on what kind of ads you want to show (technically speaking - like "animated" vs. "static", with how many fps, etc...)?
Also this part of the ads.google.com site https://ads.google.com/intl/en_NZ/home/resources/advanced/ has a reasonable amount of stuff within it but obviously only from a Google point of view. I don't suppose it matters but that's the NZ version of the page, probably only the 0800 number is specific to NZ but you might change en_NZ to whatever your language code is.
That was an opportunity, to cache the map as an image, and switch it later to the proper map.
Seems to me the best monetisation he could do is selling himself. Even a couple hours work off the back of it would have been beating any ad's etc.
I had a minor web hit in the 90s, tried to do affiliate links etc but nothing really worked but I did get a little bit of work from it that has been indirectly the launch pad for a few side projects. None made me rich but they've all been a step forward.
And it was quite easy to do back in the early days of the Internet. I ran one such site in the early 2000s, which attracted 30 million page views per month at its peak.
Like the author, I kept trying all kinds of things to monetize it, at the end affiliate programs and google Adsense worked the best.
[1] https://simpleanalytics.com/istheshipstillstuck.com?utm_sour...
Does HN show viewing stats for comments? Might be nice for the sites featured on it to know.
Viral or click bait stuff on "hot" topics can foster a lot of insubstantive and often fighty comments. That's a known phenomenon on the site.
The results:
- 250 upvotes
- 101 comments
- 6,675 site views (over the 1.5 days it was frontpage)
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From no traffic to 10+ million visitors and being featured on late night talk shows. It was 6 lines of JavaScript and took 20 minutes to build but peaked at making $5,000 a day from ads.
I ended up chatting with its creator on how he built and hosted it at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo....
But since then it looks like he transferred the site to someone else because now it's an e-commerce shop instead of a toilet paper calculator like it once was.