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).
That is, it comes with lots of advantages through being part of an ecosystem that people may already be part of or at least have some trust in because it is well known. Additionally it's already associated with helping people and projects in a way that may not be purely transactional, which fits how some people feel about their projects (thus the option to donate as discussed here).
Just because two models can be boiled down to essentially the same thing doesn't always mean they will perform equally as well. Sometimes the small distinctions and details are very important.
There's lots to unpack there that make it different than most other games I've played, but you can get a good idea from watching some Twitch streams.
It is almost a must if you're a casual player. It is too hard to keep up with the barters, flea market rates and even just the quests and items for quests.
I haven't played in a few weeks though, from a combination of the friend I usually play with being less interested (and not wanting to level/quest much without him) and being busier myself. That's sad, because it really is pretty amazing once you get the hang of it (I just stared at beginning of this wipe) and have someone to play with. Playing alone is fun too, but with one or two good friends is really something special.
I'm not sure I would consider what they do effective in banning trade bots (the captcha seems ridiculously easily beaten), I think the Found In Raid object flag is probably the really effective thing keeping most bot usage down, since it attacks the actual incentives of using a bot (it's still useful to auto-buy when markets dip or someone under lists an item, but that's about it I think, but I may be missing a use).
That said, if all you're doing is scanning the market results and not buying anything, it's probably much easier to not trigger any problems with the devs. The market data is really useful for those that like that sort of thing, but it's not really that much of an advantage, just a way for those into the economic portion of the game to go deeper.
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.
In this case you might decide to provide early access to new features for subscribers, for example.
But some of them just seem to very creatively thank you for your support. I recall reading one that waxed eloquent about how supporting them at the one dollar level would buy you a guilt-free conscience with regards to consuming their content or something like that.
It works, true, eg Andrew Kelley is funding his Zig work that way and it's pretty amazing to see him ace it. But damn you gotta be a particular kind of person to not get extremely stressed out about that prospect.
p.s. Not saying there are no people who didn't manage to pull it off, but I'm pretty sure those people are exceptions rather than the rule.
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
Using the methods I outline.
Not proof, but I have experience and I tell you, done properly donations can be very lucrative.
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.
There are 3 other projects to which I'd like as well to donate something but they're all using different services ( https://donorbox.org , https://ko-fi.com , https://liberapay.com ) => I don't want to lose control over my donations and creating accounts there as well would have that effect on me.
Therefore, I think that somebody that would like to receive donations should try make multiple options available - hoping for the opposite (that whoever donates will use the specific service that you chose) won't work.
Any donations for this idea?
Seems like linktr.ee does a good job of aggregating links. So, the "donate" link could link to that, which then displays a bunch of options. However, I believe that a familiar icon - like the patreon icon - helps people make decisions.
I was thinking of an aggregator for the donator, i.e. something that aggregates your multiple accounts on multiple donation services.
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).
Subscriptions are the best, but obv that won’t work for a meme page.
In my case I donated only once to them and I understood only later that (apparently?) most of the $ isn't being used for Wikipedia, therefore as I'm not interested in their other projects I never donated anything anymore to them - they can make that banner as big&flashy as they want but the fact remains that I don't want my $ used for non-Wikipedia-related activities.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
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.
There’s nearly 8,000,000,000 humans, so there’s a ton of variety that one can’t even imagine, but probably none of them want to eat a bar of soap for breakfast each day even if you think there must be some rare 1 in 1,000,000 out there.
Putting 1 in BIG NUMBER is just a way we abstract away hard and intimidating questions.
Perhaps. But at least that's just on paper. Resorting to advertising means actually forgetting your visitors are people.
Spam’s success rate would be dictated by the percentage of the people who want the product in the general population after passing through the spam delivery funnel.
With the donations it’s completely different mechanism.
Nevertheless, the fallacy is that small looking number of market share is the smallest possible market share.
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.
Only then we will have proved that the vast majority of people will not pay a dime for content on the web.
CPM is cost per mille, AKA cost per thousand impressions. Revenue from 50,000,000 impressions would be CPM * 50,000.
If it's all about the icon displayed next to the comment header, I suppose that's a kind of amplification -- but it seems like less of a zero-sum game, because it's not forcing another opinion out of view.
I never thought about it like this. I always just thought of Reddit Gold as just another weird Internet quirk I will never understand.
I kind of wonder if NFTs for artwork will become the same thing. Like amplifying comments, maybe high NFT prices will be a way to amplify one artist over another in what is a very crowded marketplace.
Paying directly for things you like on the internet doesn't seem like a big deal to us here on HN, but the overwhelming majority of people will never even consider it. Everything else is free, why should anyone have to pay for anything?
How many webpages do you read per month?
Now divide one by the other.
Edit: Just checked Homebrew analytics. >10k recorded installs in the past year (low single digit number of releases during that period, no major publicity event). I don't have readily available analytics for other installation channels on macOS, or analytics for Linux and Windows which are pretty fractured. Point is the user base is sizable.
I can't remember ever hearing someone talk about how successful their donation button was. I can remember plenty of people describing how few people ever click it, though...
My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software.
[1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink
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.
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.
/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.
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.