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Ask HN: How much do you earn with donations vs. ads?

• df-official 11y ago
  I'm running into the same issues. DevFactor (http://www.youtube.com/devfactor http://www.youtube.com/devfactor) runs entirely on ad-funding and donations. After shutting down our WordPress site to roll our on RoR custom application, Google penalized our SEO for being offline so long. Ad-earnings in December 2014: $700, Affiliate Earnings: $200, Donations: $25. We now have a YT channel that is monetized, bringing in about $150/mo. Because Google basically declared us dead and dropped all of our ranks (we where offline for 1 month) - http://www.devfactor.io http://www.devfactor.io has gone from 300k uniq/mo to like 5k uniq/mo. CPM rates have also been dropping :( Hard to offer such a important service that takes hundreds of hours to build up when the $/hour comes out to below minimum wage. December 2014 CPM rates (website) where around $1.5. Now looking at $0.50. Affiliate earnings have not changed (on a per/visitor basis), and I would suggest looking into affiliate programs as they provide more stability month to month (no reliance on ad-market CPM fluctuations.) There have been weeks in the past when I've spent 80 hours or more on this project - bummer the good CPM rates are getting eaten up by how much noise there is in the market. Preference for quality is really a thing of the past for the internet it seems. To write and record a really good tutorial series, transcribe it all and pull out the important code can take 100 hours. Other blogs just hack out an un-edited snippet of code every 30 minutes and get much more traffic. Once I finish migrating all of our old text-based tutorials to video tutorials, and get good enough to consider myself a "decent video editor". I have consider offering a "Pay What You Want" option for additional features and support. The nature of the project is of course a passion project, so charging outright would be hard for me to do.
• nugget 11y ago
  What kinds of websites do you have? I think monetization for different verticals is likely to diverge radically in the next few years.
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    Small online tools. No content pages, just some convert x to y or stuff like that. The problems you can solve with those pages are too small to ask for user registration or a fee.
    • briholt 11y ago
      Could you share what they are?
      • minhyeok 11y ago
        smallpdf.com
        • cJ0th 11y ago
          I would imagine that your service can be turned into a SaaS. For example: a free service that allows x pages per ip address a day and a premium service with an "unlimited" amount of conversions.
          • tobltobs 11y ago
            Because the concurrence would happily take your users if you start asking for money.
        • HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
          Are you kidding? Donation? This is worth real money: sell it.
        • briholt 11y ago
          That's a pretty sweet site. I'd vote a freemium option. You could do things like: X conversions free per IP per month, upgrade for more X Mb files are free, upgrade for bigger files Do you have some stats on visitor loyalty? You probably get a lot of passer-bys, but the 1% that uses you weekly should be paying. It's not too much work to set up a Stripe or Paypal subscription service and put up a little paywall. It reminds me of https://www.url2png.com/ https://www.url2png.com/ which I subscribed to for a while.
• stephengillie 11y ago
  > 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.
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    Yes, 200 times more. But that was about 3 years ago. Since then the cpm dropped, so in the meantime and it should be closer to 100 times more.
    • stephengillie 11y ago
      How do you place your own donation ads in relation to your advertisers' ads?
      • tobltobs 11y ago
        There is just a donation point in the navigation.
  • superasn 11y ago
    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.
• reddavis 11y ago
  We went for a "pay what you want" model for my latest app. It's a real simple utility app but we were pleasantly surprised with what people paid. I gave a quick overview of all the numbers here https://medium.com/@reddavis/stand-app-9ee0fc3355c https://medium.com/@reddavis/stand-app-9ee0fc3355c
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    This could be an idea. Before every conversion (or daily) ask for a payment, which could be 0. But without the possibility to make economical payments in the 10cent area this will not work.
    • nfd 11y ago
      Yeah, you'd basically need cash or cryptocurrency for that size of microtransaction (nanotransaction?). If I could pitch in 20-50 cents to a project I like in a few seconds, I would.
    • Mz 11y ago
      Some of the discussion here might interest you as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042368
• beambot 11y ago
  What type of website? For something with regularly-updated content, Patreon can be pretty compelling. For example, I know several YouTubers who earn as much via Patreon as they do from YouTube ads.
  • emerongi 11y ago
    I know YouTubers who couldn't live without Patreon. It's their only source of income. To make a living from YT you have to have a pretty huge number of viewers. Fortunately, their viewers are hard-core fans and ~0.5% - 1.0% of their subscribers donate to them. Seems little, but it's actually a lot (consider that you have to view 1000 videos to "give" a Youtuber $1 via ads). As a comparison: A certain Youtuber with 1.8M subscribers makes about as much from ads as another with 300K subscribers from Patreon.
• tajen 11y ago
  We need a patio11 person dedicated to donation-based software ;) Does it work better if the software is open-source, but the donation is mandatory in the original version of the binaries?
  • johnward 11y ago
    Maybe we don't have one because it's a poor business model?
  • patio11 11y ago
    Would it be presumptuous of me to mention why that is not me? Because, in 10 years of doing this, I've seen one small business do decently well with the donation model. (It's Paint.NET. Rich asked me not to mention the numbers when he told me them, and I respect his wishes, but let's say "A quite happy result which supports a small team in a sustainable fashion.") I have also seen many developers try it. Monks take a vow of poverty, because it can be spiritually fulfilling, but I do not believe many people would take a vow of poverty so that they can devote every waking moment to fixing the problems of for-profit companies. (There are individual people I'm thinking of while writing this. I won't mention their situations, for the obvious reasons, but I'm generally a quiet restrained guy and, after a coffee date with one of them, I nearly put my fist through a mirror out of vicarious frustration with injustice.) There are so, so many better business models than taking donations. Let's move the conversation to those better models. "Charge money for goods and services" provides plenty of room for experimentation and has the desirable property of actually working.
• megaman22 11y ago
  I've made about $25 from donations, vs about $70 from AdWords and Amazon affiliate links, over the course of about two years. Of course, I actually got the $25 from the donations, whereas the ad revenue is still waiting to hit the minimum payment thresholds...
• jacquesm 11y ago
  I put up a bitcoin donations link on reocities.com a couple of years ago, so far it paid ~$100.
• herval 11y ago
  I had a guestbook/guestmap site for almost 10 years. Ads never made me more than $200/month, whereas donations (you donate whatever you want to remove ads from your guestmap) really picked up some times of the year (I got a $150 donation on thanksgiving, among almost $2k in random donations on the same month - best month in the entire lifetime of the site). Ad revenue tapered off during the years, stabilizing at under $5/month in 2013, donations averaged $200/month until the end (average $12)
  • ytpete 11y ago
    That's not purely donations though. Paying to remove ads is more like a freemium model IMHO, since people get something (a nicer user experience) in exchange for their money.
    • herval 11y ago
      Indeed, it's "pay what you want". Should've been clearer.0, sorry!
• mijustin 11y ago
  Another avenue is membership. Gimlet Media is experimenting with this right now: https://gimletmedia.com/join-gimlet/ https://gimletmedia.com/join-gimlet/ Members support their company at $5 / month, or $60 / year. The challenge with all of this, is that no one has been really able to make a lot of money with the donation paradigm. For example, 5by5, a hugely popular podcast site, has roughly $2,500 / month in donations on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/5by5 https://www.patreon.com/5by5 If you look on https://recurrency.us/discover https://recurrency.us/discover, you can see how much bloggers there are making. Not much.
  • ohitsdom 11y ago
    Arstechnica is another good example of membership. If you're a paying member, no ads. Otherwise, ads. Best of both worlds and you give your audience a choice in how to support you.
    • radmuzom 11y ago
      If you are using ad-blockers, how does it matter if you are a paying member or not? Am I missing something obvious?
      • OrwellianChild 11y ago
        The obvious bit is this: You are circumventing their revenue model. If you like/want to support their content, this is not an ideal way to show that support. Either turn off the ad-blocker or pay for membership.
        • tajen 11y ago
          Honest, lateral question: Now that I think about it, will DRM prevent the use of ad-blockers on a majority of websites? Could this be a sweepingly major side-effect of DRMs?
• softwarerero 11y ago
  This is the monthly income for a news site with about 160 monthly articles and 143.000 monthly page views: Direct Ad Space: 170$, AdSense 50$, Sponsored Articles: 45$, Amazon: 4$, Donations: 0$
• monknomo 11y ago
  Has anyone tried a Humble Bundle approach, where users buy the software and have the option of entering $0? I suspect having a non-zero default payment and a guilt-inducing average payment would encourage people to donate, while allowing them the option to just get it for free. I could put on my patio11 hat and say "Just charge for it"
  • howderek 11y ago
    Yeah, ElementaryOS did that, I'm not sure what their numbers look like though
  • jackmaney 11y ago
    A neat idea, but I think that Humble Bundle mostly has bundles of games (or software directly related to games)... Hmmm, making a more open Humble Bundle type shop could be a neat idea, and I see that openbundles.com is currently available.
    • monknomo 11y ago
      Don't let me stand in the way of an opensource bundle promotion dealy-bopper, but all I meant was borrowing the concept that they use when you "buy" a bundle. Instead of letting a user directly download whatever free opensource widget you've made and hoping they donate, plant a big mean 'ole "are you going to buy that?" screen before the download link. A free open bundle library would make this a lot easier, but if someone writes one, for the love of god, dogfood it! We can't have you starving in the streets while trying to make other altruistic developers money. ;)
  • zhte415 11y ago
    I've used this, as a 'buyer' (and have bought in several cases) for things like books and detailed articles written by independent people. One extra benefit is 'please sign up for email updates' which while in almost all cases not mandatory, comes with text like "stay up to date" or "receive insights". I usually do sign-up, and this keeps the person providing these updates with another potential customer for other stuff, and me with usually useful (as I've self-selected as being interested) and interesting updates. Win-win.
• corysama 11y ago
  I don't know their numbers, but http://synergy-project.org/ http://synergy-project.org/ is a good example of how to get donations. It's a public, GPL project https://github.com/synergy/synergy https://github.com/synergy/synergy You can either compile it yourself or you can go through the very smooth purchase process to get a lifetime subscription to pre-compiled binary installers for $10. It was much cheaper for me to just type in my CC# and move on with enjoying the program than to even investigate compiling it myself. Both Synergy and Humble Bundle do the same thing: They make going through the checkout line a smooth, easy, natural process on the path to getting the software. The problem with donations is not really that people are so cheap. It's that they're so lazy. If you give them what they want up front and then ask that they come back later to go through some awkward process to give you money for something they already have... Well, what do you expect? It's too late. They've moved on with their day. They can't be bothered. But, if you make it very easy to give you money on the path to giving them the goods. Then their appreciation and generosity doesn't require much effort. That's the key.
  • trestletech 11y ago
    +1 and I really like the idea of that model and wanted to support Synergy in particular, but I almost gave up when I saw I'd have to compile from source, then did give up once I started encountering errors building from source. I would have happily given them money if they could have proven that the product worked on my equipment first (free trial, etc.) but given that it didn't seem to work, I bailed.
    • crazypyro 11y ago
      They purposely make it difficult and even removed documentation on building synergy to boost sales. You can find nightlies here: https://synergy-project.org/nightly https://synergy-project.org/nightly
      • corysama 11y ago
        I don't know anything about the history of the project. Is this the documentation you were referring to? Or, was it something else? https://github.com/synergy/synergy/wiki/Compiling https://github.com/synergy/synergy/wiki/Compiling
• pornel 11y ago
  Sponsorship works for me. Companies got in touch with me directly saying they'd like to sponsor my project. I put on my project pages "This nice company sponsors my project". I ensure that's actually a company I can endorse, and my users aren't exposed to any nasty ad scripts. Both donations and sponsorship pale in comparison with development/consulting fees. When a company needs a feature they're happy to pay a proper daily rate.
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    Isn't sponsorship another name for link buying. I do get those offers but the amount people are willing to pay is minimal. It would make more than donations, but on the other side big G doesn't like link sellers and therefore it is not worth the risk imho.
    • pornel 11y ago
      The link is clearly labelled and I don't accept any spammy "buy cheap meds" links. I hope Google doesn't kill that. I think for users one vetted link is much better than regular ads, which on software-related sites tend to be fake download buttons leading to malware.
• danneu 11y ago
  I've been running a forum since 2007 and Adsense was the boon that paid for my university and made me money. I don't think I'll ever ask for donations again. Plopping a donation button on a website seems to do nothing but make users assume that other users must be donating. I've never seen donations go anywhere without active hustling/fundraising which makes the website feel like a desperate church. Look at how much effort Wikipedia goes through to ask for donations. And after all that work you'll always make less than you would with ads. Meanwhile, sticking Adsense code on a website makes you passive money that's less annoying to your users than a donation campaign.
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    That have been my thought until yet too. However with a rapidly shrinking cpm and a a growing adblocker usage the easy times of adsense are coming to an end imho.
• Mz 11y ago
  I have always done better with donations than from ads, going back several years. I am currently researching Patreon as a possibility for the future. I have never had much traffic. I am working on that. My traffic is getting steadier and, after a whole lot of thought and research, here are some things I have done that are showing promise early on: Post a well positioned note thanking people for supporting the site by white listing you on ad blocker "or" via tips. Reposition your donate button as a tip jar. Stop using the word donations. Find language that signals that you are providing something of value and they are supporting your ability to continue making it available. So far, tips is the best word I have found. I am still doing research. The word donations makes people view you as a charity case, not someone offering something of value who somehow needs to get paid for it.
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    Thank you, that some good inputs. I will try "support us".