Donate Buttons - Problogger
Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net has been running a '31 days to building a better blog' campaign on his site, and has a few questions from readers that he has opened up for anyone to try and answer. the following is one that caught my eye:
I would like to get your opinon (and that of your readers) on Donate buttons on personal blogs. I am seeing them more and more. Is it begging? Are they tacky? Or is it simply requesting a donation for providing entertaining or informative commentary?
I feel I can probably put some feedback into this one, as for a long time on scoobyphotos.com (ok, not a blog, but it is a resource site) I had a paypal donate button on the front page. Net result, about 10 cups of coffee. A pretty bad return by anyones standards.
The proliferation of these donate buttons on personal sites is an attempt to raise some money, normally to cover hosting fees. Are they tacky? Well, in a way yes, because its like admiting that you need some help financially to be able to provide a service that on the face of it, looks like it should be free.
I removed the paypall button off my site when I realised that it was giving out the wrong impression to my key visitors, and people were not donating because they cannot see the hidden costs (both time and hosting) of a website, unless they happen to run one themselves.
If you feel that your content is worth paying for, you need to develop a mechanism which allows you to charge for the premium content whilst not excluding casual visitors from your site. Something like a members area. This will only work if you have content that is unavailable elsewhere. Most people take the web for granted, and expect content to be free to consume whenever and however they want.
I'd love to hear from anyone running a fairly low volume personal website that has had success from using a 'donate' button, because I cannot see how it can possibly work.
4 Comments:
I used to have a donate button on my wiki (like yours, a resource and not personal site), until I realized that one, nobody was giving to it, and two, it did make me look like I was running the site just to grub for money.
Ten cups of coffee worth is still pretty good; my standard 'meeting someone who did something cool that I liked a lot' gesture of recognition is getting them a cup of coffee somewhere, so at least you can feel like ten people really, really feel you did them a favor with your site.
"fairly low volume personal website" .. well, that would be me. I used to have a "donate $1" button on a 3rd level page, maybe off of a link from the About Me page, just to see.
I actually just put up a donate button on my blog, for the price of Coffee. I don't expect to cover my hosting fees .. I can let you know how it goes ... so far nothing.
Hi,
I sent Darren the question. I too, had a "donate" button on my blog (briefly). Every time the page opened, and I saw it, I felt queasy.
I didn't get any donations.
The discomfort it created for me, was not worth holding out for the possiblity that someone would evenually leave a donation.
Thank you for continuing the discussion.
So it looks like donate buttons aren't working very well for anyone. Its a nice idea in principle, but I guess the difference between people appreciating your work and donating money in appreciation of it is vaste.
I guess subscription based content is the only way to acheive a similar goal.
Post a Comment
<< Home