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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

Donation income is risibly small.

People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer.

...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying.

Let me put it differently: with the same traffic, donations barely cover my groceries, and affiliate income is a comfortable salary.

I'm at peace with that. I make free things for a reason. It's just something to keep in mind when suggesting donations as a business model. Doubly so as an alternative to ads.

Another tidbit: praise people who create the things you use. It feels so good to know that people use and love the fruits of your labour. I've become lavish in my praise after experience the effects of it.

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I think the main obstacle to donations, even for those who _would_ wish to donate, is the fact that it requires a premeditated process (e.g. going to the project homepage to donate) or that it makes the request _before_ the user had a chance to realize how useful it is, rather than after.

If instead there is some way to capitalize the timing of the user experiencing "wow this makes my life so much easier!" to remind them with a low-friction shortcut to make a donation, this short-circuits the cognitive process that previously require the user's mind to go out of its way to invoke their "oh, I should probably donate" sense of reciprocity.

As reviled as impulse-driven microtransactions are, I think there is much for open-source projects to learn from and wield in an ethical manner.

Right now it seems there is a false dichotomy between being either [be unethical and leverage user impulse] or [be ethical and off-putting to the user].

There is no reason why an understanding of the psychology in friction-reduction can be utilized ethically to encourage "impulse-reciprocity".

A model that might be worth analyzing is the streamer-donation UX flow -- yes it can be used irresponsibly to encourage parasocial obsession, but in the hands of the responsible it is a facilitation of healthy engagements with the audience

My tip jar is in my email signature, which means it's part of the answer people get when they request free support from me. It's also at the end of the content they consume from my website.

Depends how you present it. The Ubuntu download page used to punch you in the face asking for donations. They also tried sliders, asking downloaders to choose how to spend the money they donated. These were super successful. People felt in control of how their money was spent. There was no way for them to check in on that, it was a trust process. But the net result was a lot of people donated a very significant amount of money.

Similarly I understand (from an interview with the developer) that the eBook software Calibre gets a significant number of donations from users via the giant donate button in the toolbar.

I do agree, having a "tip jar" option for donations is rarely as successful as the above methods though. Not diminishing your personal experience. Just saying it's possible to change the way things are done, and get more.

There's the thing though. The numbers above are for making money without annoying or guilt-tripping my readers.

If I didn't care about user experience, I could earn more from donations, but I could also earn much more from affiliate links.

As it is, I just list a few options when I happen to mention a products. There is a tip jar at the end of every guide, and in my email signature.

I think that's all there is to it really. People just don't want to donate.

That's it. I don't donate so often myself.

Tipping in the real world is easy. You just leave some of the money you have on you. Tipping online is a far more deliberate process, unless you're already processing payments.

Thanks for sharing your experience & insight. You’re observations are similar to our experience. We as a community could always do a better job recognising & rewarding each other.

What do you mean when you refer to "affiliate income"? Is that like ads, or putting your ID in Amazon links, or something like that?

I use affiliate links for the products I mention in my guides. There is no promotion beyond "if you need this service I just talked about, these options exist in your language".

If I actually pitched products, I'd make even more.

If many open projects are funded via ads, will Copilot tools crater open source revenues by reducing traffic to documentation?

Most projects aren't funded at all.

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