Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

I have 250k monthly users who are very addicted to the sites I run, my sites are their #1 destination. I've even encouraged people to use Brave (and Firefox) as I'm for any browser that improves privacy and easily allows a NoScript experience with per-site exceptions built right into the main browser bar (it's even easier than using NoScript in Firefox).

From that... barely $10-20 per month.

I simply don't believe that Brave users are actively topping up BAT so that it's distributed.

Instead I put a PayPal donate button on one of the websites - no target published, no progress, just a dumb button on the home page and to the side.

That single donate button gets ~$500 per month and is enough to cover most of the costs associated with running all of the websites.

I still think the best way to provide a good, ad-free, tracking-free service - is to ask your users to contribute what they feel the value is.

NB: This is not my job, I'm pretty sure I could make a lot more money if I cared to but this is a side project and done with no need for profit. Meeting costs is all I'm going for - BAT is not going to do that and my costs are low for what I serve.

Just as another data-point...

~250k monthly unique users, as well as actively promoting it (to the point where they make up ~15% of users) and it's bringing ~$500/mo.

Slightly unrelated, it's been a bit of a pain to have all the site features - mostly related to Canvas API - work for Brave users, since fair amount of them are absent in Brave due to their fingerprinting potential.

The difference may be those with auto contribute vs those that directly contribute. I have auto contribute off because I don't see much benefit if I can choose to directly contribute to those that I felt created great content, not just happened to have decent SEO.

I m actively promoting brave -- most users are using adblockers anyway, so why not promote a better system. BAT payments are still too small . That's inevitable considering how difficult it is to get started with a crypto wallet compared to paypal where tons of people already have accounts. I am hopeful that crypto payments catch on though.

It might be a little bit of a chicken-and-egg type thing: I just checked my "Brave Rewards" tab and was surprised to find exactly two (2) of all the websites I'd visited in the last month accepted Brave rewards. That's the first time I think I've seen any, after using Brave for almost 9 months.

I like the idea of putting in $10 or $20/mo for funding websites I visit, but why should I put in $10 a month if nobody's actually taking the money?

Does your money get distributed equally? Ie if you put in $10/mo but only visit one site once, does it get all of the $10, or is there some sort of price per-view being negotiated somehow?

It seems like it's distributed based on % of attention. You can also set the minimum number of visits and minimum page time for a site to start counting.

FYI there are lots of different ways to contribute money to a website EDIT within the Brave / BAT system. You can manually "tip" a website a fixed amount of BAT; you can set up a monthly donation of BAT to the website; and you can have a fixed amount that automatically gets sent once a month to the websites you've viewed based on how much time you've spent there.

And of course there are two ways to get money into your account: 1) Upload money directly, 2) Look at ads through the Brave ad network.

So far I've only been doing #2, which for me generates between $0.50 and $1 worth of BAT every month.

For the automatic division -- it's not exactly clear to me what happens. Is all of my $0.50 next month going to be divided between those two websites that are registered? Are they only getting their own little share of a few cents each? If so, what's happening to the BAT for the other websites?

How does collecting donations via PayPal work? Isn't it that everyone who donates is doing something similar to a purchase, so you would have to collect VAT depending on where you are and where the "customer" is?

At least this is how I think it would be in Europe. But I would imagine similar rules for VAT are in place all around the world.

I can’t speak for all of Europe, but according to our tax accountant, In Germany, pure donations to a company can be VAT-free. To count as a donation, the money must be freely given, with no expectation of any reward. If you promise swag, sponsor benefits, ... it’s no longer a donation. Benefits can include things like the promise of a prominent logo placement. (Promotion)

Obviously, if you plan on doing any of this - talk to your tax accountant.

Can Patreon be used in Germany then? Websites all seem to offer some perks in return for the Patreon "donations".

Yes, but not as donations.

I don't see why not, it wouldn't be a donation (in the tax law sense) though.

Which means that you would have to collect VAT based on the location of the person who paid the money.

Is Patreon handling that for you?

That is a good question that you should discuss with your tax accountant :)

I don’t know about the specifics of how payment works on patreon, but there are services that help with the tax issue. Quaderno https://www.quaderno.io/ is one that we have used for selling (remote) trainings. It ties into stripe, so that’s fairly simple to set up. Keep in mind that if you have to do the VAT dance, you’ll most likely need to provide the customer with a suitable receipt as well, so you’ll have to own that part of the checkout process.

Also consider that the VAT rules are less complicated for physical goods - the complicated ruleset mostly applies to digital-only goods. Things may also be less complicated if you’re a private person and use patreon as support for a hobby.

Yes, Patreon automatically collects VAT. So if somebody in Finland pays you €1 they're charged €1.24 to cover VAT.

Are the whole €1.24 then transferred to the website owner plus the information to pay €0.24 in VAT?

I know that here in Australia you don't need to collect/pay tax for revenue generating hobbies.

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