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Ask HN: Anyone experienced with donations instead of adsense?
I hate ads. I truly do. I believe they cheapen great content and cheapen a brand. They are a "necessary evil" if you want to make money and pay the overhead of a site though.
For the last year I have been running my site out of my own pocket, because I love what I do. On any good day I'll bring in 10-20 dollars with Google Adsense. Not bad, it pays the bills and I'm OK with that. My best 48 hours I hit the front page of Reddit, 300,000 uniques, and made a whopping $554 in adsense money. WOO! Too bad my hosting bill including overages was $550. I pocketed $4.
I've noticed a few sites, namely wikipedia, run solely on donations. Mind you, I know the amount of traffic that they have and my site pales in comparison to them.
Do you think it's worth a shot to take out all the ads and try to rely solely on donations? Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, what happened?
- sidko 13y agoProbably worth a shot anyway. There are some good startups working on micro-payments. BitWall is one of them (that ran a test on Chicago Sun Times) that you might check out. In the Bitcoin world, Coinbase has an easy widget you can install for donating Bitcoins. Sorry if this reply isn't very helpful or not what you're looking for, these are just the options I know. Good luck!
- astrowilliam 13y agoThanks for the input! I'll look into BitWall as well as Coinbase to help with funding. This is my passion and also my side project so it would be nice to do it the way it should be done instead of the way that is boring and stale.