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).
Yes. It's a plain old subscription in the same way that using a card linked to your iPhone or Android phone to pay for a subscription through their app stores is a plain old subscription.
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.
Escape From Tarkov. It's a real interesting mix of shooter, stealth, and looting/management that I haven't really seen anywhere else. It's on the realism side of the spectrum, which I like. It's also extremely unforgiving, which is good for those that are a bit masochistic in their gaming, which apparently I am.
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.
Yep. :) I signed up a couple months ago for historical market data because I'm a sucker for that, but the added features since then have really cemented it as a good decision.
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.
AFAIK he's using RatScanner[1], or something like it. I'm pretty sure the admin of RatScanner is in the Discord quite a bit, but that could be a coincidence (but I think it's some form of image processing lib no matter what, they include a screen cap of the latest market info for an item on the page when you pay).
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.
It’s all done just by image processing. Once premium you can see the screenshots of the items on market used to provide the price estimate. They must have a couple accounts running continually going through the market checking prices. That’s why some items are 2-3 hours delayed.
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.
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.
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.
That's all true but it means that you need to market your person, become an "internet personality" just to collect donations on something technical that you built
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.
I don't think it's mandatory to become a different kind of person or to market yourself in extroverted ways. I think you could get that effect with subtler things. I guess we often treat our works and online presence (as in open source or open access projects) as functional non-human items. Maybe if we saw them more as extensions of the author...
Ah, you've beet me to it skrebbel. :) I actually wanted to write something like this. It's really hard to be what you are (in my case - a very introverted and private person), give something valuable to the world and actually live from that.
That would be a beautiful life, really.
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.
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.
Back in the stone ages Slashdot gave subscribers a comment bonus and an indication the user was a subscriber. An icon in the forums or some small benefit for "subscribing" goes a long way to get people to fork over a few dollars for something.
Lichess is a good example - their "subscription" gives a cool Patron icon wherever your user name is listed (usually the icon is just a circle that's filled if you're online), and that's it.
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.
Snowdrift has a scheme like this, but even better: Crowdmatching, where your donation increases as more people jump in (and you can set a max donation).
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.
Yeah, as a (small/tiny) donator for 3 projects so far I personally liked Patreon - neat, simple, it works.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm a patron of multiple people, from Authors to people running a website providing info on a game, that are making $10k-$20k a month in Patreon from those projects through $5-$10 monthly payments. It's amazing how much money you can make, but I think you really do have to offer something to get people to bite.
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).
So how does Wikipedia manage to get donations? Is it just a scale problem where you needs hundreds of millions of pageviews a day to generate any meaningful number of donations?
Each time Wikipedia does a donation drive they have a thing that says "If everyone who used Wikipedia donated $1, we'd be done in 10 minutes!" (or similar). Yet these drives go on for months. The problem is that only a vanishingly small percentage of users donate.
Wikipedia has a lot more utility than a website about a current event you're gonna visit 2 or 3 times before the issue is resolved. It's a lot easier to justify that donation.
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.
Wikipedia is in my opinion unluckily a complex example because the donations are actually for Wikimedia.
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.
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.
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.