I took ads off my site and replaced with Bitcoin donations, it didn't work. | Hacker News Reader

I took ads off my site and replaced with Bitcoin donations, it didn't work.

ionthesky.com

42 pointsastrowilliam66 comments

I wanted to donate to my favourite private tracker recently. They only take bitcoin. So I thought no worries, I'll sign up to coinbase. They were the suggested easy-to-sign-up-to way to get bitcoins. (I don't know about wallets or mining, I'm just your average Internet joe)

They wanted copies of my passport and drivers license.

I laughed and closed my newly created account.

Until the process of being able to get bitcoins is simple and easy, expecting people to part with them for donations is unrealistic in my opinion.

(Please don't follow up with 20 "easy" ways I could have gotten bitcoins, after that experience I really don't care)

That's weird. When I signed up with Coinbase I didn't have to supply any of that information. Are you based outside the USA?

Yes, I live in New Zealand. As another poster has said, it appears to be due to US money laundering laws.

Ahh, ok. That would explain it. I can see their point, it helps cut down on illegal activity. But it's also a pain for users like yourself who would have really enjoyed their service.

I'm in a similar position—I'd like to purchase a small amount of BTC, but am not willing to use my credit card or send photocopies of ID papers over the internet to do so.

I suspect that I should simply attend a meetup in my city and do an in-person transaction for cash. But all of that is additionally complicated by the fact that I don't use a smartphone. :)

If you are prepared to take a hit on multiple exchanges you can buy Bitcoin using https://www.virwox.com/‎ using Paypal.

You input Dollars use that to buy Linden then use that to buy Bitcoin. You pay exchange fees for each transaction, and you are limited to small amounts each month till you gain credibility, but it is possible.

> They wanted copies of my passport and drivers license.

If you go to a bank and try to create a bank account, do you laugh when they ask you for your ID and proof of residence? :)

This isn't a good comparison. I have no reason to trust Coinbase and my options for recourse are minimal if they end up being shitty. My bank is an institution with capital assets in my city. I know where they are. They have an address and it's local. I can talk to a manager, face to face, if there is a problem. (And have.)

(And my bank has a better security record than Bitcoin companies have thus far shown, besides.)

How do you feel about online banks, like Ally?

I don't use them. I like having someone whose office I can sit in and very politely refuse to leave until things work out to everyone's satisfaction.

Ally is a bank and regulated as one, even though they're 'online'. Coinbase is not regulated as a bank. They're not even regulated under the much looser guidelines of a money transmitter.

Yeah, but bitcoin businesses may have to follow the same regulations no matter what if they considered as dealing currencies (depends on your local jurisdiction). That's what it boils down to. It's probably not Coinbase who independently implemented this requirement.

But it's Coinbase who wants me to trust them with my driver's license and passport despite being Some Faceless Internet Company. That business model kind of sucks. It may not be their fault that it sucks, but it still kind of sucks.

> But it's Coinbase who wants me to trust them with my driver's license and passport despite being Some Faceless Internet Company.

Most Internet Companies are faceless. Yet people still use AirBnB, Uber, and other services that connect them to people they don't know - and that kind of thing can be a source of risks as well.

By the way, whenever you go in a hotel overseas, they'll ask you about a copy of your passport too. Do you trust every single hotel that they will keep your passport copy secure ? I'd probably trust Coinbase more on that than any second grade hotel out there.

Uber doesn't demand I give them an archival copy of all my identification to use them. (AirBnB might, I wouldn't know because I wouldn't ever use them.) The difference between these companies--or ones I actually use--should be quite obvious, but I get that the Disingenuous Bitcoin Guy schtick is powerfully tempting.

(And I have never had my passport copied by any hotel.)

If you go to PayPal and want to open regular account for low transactions, do they ask you for ID and proof of residence? You cannot compare brick and mortar bank to bitcoin service.

For low transactions maybe, but as soon as you want to do anything more with your Paypal account they will ask for the same kind of papers. I find nothing strange about that.

You said it yourself - for low transactions. When people donate/do transactions around the web they wont spend probably more than $100 in one go. If any bitcoin service would be worried about scam they would implement same security measures - lets say limit of $100 per transaction or total of $1K per year before they ask for papers. Easy and saves them a lot of money on processing applications as well.

Paypal didn't ask me for that. I just entered my Visa details and I donate. Google Wallet hasn't asked me.

I guess I made enough on paypal that they were all of the sudden interested in proof of my SSN, and a copy of my DL. That is when I realized that my paypal account was setup in an unlicensed company name, that didn't match my SSN or my DL. They won't allow me to correct the error. Had to close the account.

It's important to note that this is to comply with US money laundering laws. There's no technical reason for this to be the case.

Ahhh ok, thank you, I wasn't aware of that. Why isn't it the case with Paypal etc?

Presumably because PayPal transactions are reversible; Bitcoin transactions are not.

If you try to put money into Paypal you'll likely create some link with a verified source (credit card, bank account). So if some investigation were to happen Paypal at least has some hints as to your real identity.

With coinbase people could put in their (mined) bitcoins, and then sell them. In that case Coinbase has effectively no way of figuring out who you are.

What happens with the money after you sell them? That has to go somewhere, and couldn't that create the "link" required?

Yeah I thought of that, I think banks/money handling services have responsibilities before the actual pulling out though (probably like how pawn shops can't accept goods without ID).

PayPal is a reversible transaction where they know their customer (who you are paying), so they don't take risk when accepting your credit card. In BTC unless you have it already you need to become the customer of an exchange to first buy BTC and the laws there make it such that they need government ID. There are alternatives like mining it yourself (very hard) or meeting someone in person and paying cash (you'll pay a premium).

True, if you use a third party, you lose many of the benefits of Bitcoin, and the existing client programs may not be very good at helping you integrate.

But you don't need to use a third party, so you don't need to give anyone any ID (or put up with their hassles), so long as you just want to receive BTC without converting back. You just download a bitcoin client, and it generates addresses for you. Give out the address, and you're done -- people know where to sent it, and you can receive them.

Naturally, you'd want to make sure the private keys to those generated addresses are backed up and safe.

> But you don't need to use a third party

But how do you get bitcoins in the first place without going through an Exchange ?

Ah, seems I misunderstood the situation -- I was thinking of the article's use case (of simply wanting to receive BTC as donations) rather than the GGP's problem, which was getting the BTC in order to donate.

I just wanted to donate money though. Even if I download a wallet app thing, how do I transfer my actual currency to BTC? I still need an exchange don't I? Then I buy "already mined" coins in exchange for my dollars, so I can then donate them.

That's the problem, it's only easy to get BTC from someone else with BTC. It's hard to get BTC for USD and get USD for BTC. Most USD transactions that are not in cash are reversible and no BTC transactions are, that makes it very tough to get BTC on the internet. Add in all the know your customer laws to prevent money laundering and it's very difficult to exchange BTC for USB without effectively setting up a new bank account.

They didnt ask for my passport and drivers license because I live in the US but if they did it wouldn't push me away, its not like I have a million dollars to money launder, and in the group of Bitcoin users, I am a small fish

I got rejected from one exchange that asked for a driver's license and proof of address, my driver license was ok but my proof of address was not, three days later that same exchange, MtGox, goes down. It is very easy to call a Bitcoin-based company a joke but I think Coinbase is a legitimate company.

https://www.tinkercoin.com/ will be nice, $20 worth of BitCoin one time.

> private tracker

Just to be clear, this is some sort of bittorrent thing that operates somewhere between gray and black. You want to donate, but aren't interested in having your name tied to it?

Correct. Nor are they interested in having their name tied to the transaction either I guess!

In the past month I have received roughly 100 € ($130) in donations.

I am running a much smaller site, Volafile.io, with maybe 200-500 daily users (most stay over a period of a few hours). I decided against ads and instead decided to support the site with donations.

One hundred euro cover my expenses for about two and a half month. (I also give 10% to the EFF)

I assume that for most people the main reason to donate is because they feel the site is providing value to them. Value they can actively experience. In return for their generosity I don't impose any limits on them. You can upload any amount of files without limits, download as much as you want, without countdowns or the like and you don't even need to register. Reminding users of the value you're providing is key to getting them to support your project.

And this is where he made the biggest mistakes:

- He put donation button at the top of the articles

If the user hasn't read your article, you didn't provide anything valuable to him yet. Place it at the bottom.

- He put the donation there without any explanation

What do you need the donations for? Are you some cooperation trying to squeeze a few extra-bucks or just some poor guy trying to keep his website afloat?

- The donation button is just slapped on the page

It not only looks like he didn't spend more than a few minutes integrating it on the page, it almost looks sketchy. Guide users through an additional page telling them what you'll do with their money in a few sentences. And I didn't even see his bitcoin donation button at first because it's on the opposite to the much more visibly placed paypal donation button. Even more so if you are using NoScript.

Those are just my few cents. I don't know if they'll help him if he's going to stop supporting his page with donations, but they should at least be of some use to someone else.

I think the most interesting takeaway is that he was making $60 per 60,000 readers, or $0.001 CPV. Is that normal?

$6CPM (cost per thousand views) for an established niche site seems a little on the high side but not unheard of.

Edit: Math eluded me, it's $1CPM which as others have said is pretty low.

He's only getting $1CPM here -- which is really low

The average on sites I run is around $5CPM -- during times of big budget spends (normally toward the end of fiscal quarters) I see this go up quite a bit.

I wouldn't say $1 RPM is "really low," at least not for Adsense. I would say going south of that would start to qualify, but I think the absolute average is around $1.30.

I would love to even get $1CPM on a site I run. I get 5,000 unique's a day but make very little cash.

It might be due to the nature of the site though as its aimed a programmers.

Ha -- yeah, that likely has a lot to do with it -

My most profitable site is aimed at a pretty broad demographic (movie/entertainment blog)

Other more technical sites tend to do quite worse with CPM

I have a tutorial site that is probabky 8 years old. I used to see 100k+ uniques per month. I'm not sure I have ever made more than $1 CPM via adsense, buysellads, or even targetted affiliate offers. I basically gave up and tried to sell but decide just to let it sit there and rot. contemplating removing ads and trying to eventually sell something but not sure how that will work.

I ran some adsense stats to check. Found it interesting because I never pay attention anymore. The average from 2008 until now has been $0.62 RPM (revenue per mille/thousand views). For this year my tutorial site is averaging $0.42 RPM.

The highest I have seen across other sites, some of which were made for adsense, was $3.43 RPM.

It would be very nice to get a $5CPM, but I'm hovering around the $1CPM range right now. It's not bad for a niche site like mine on Adsense, or so I've been told.

If I had some extra time I'd put some effort into selling ad space but as of right now my full time job takes up most of my time.

I wonder if all of this talk about his Adsense earnings and what he earns from Adsense is going to see his Adsense account getting whacked. My understanding is that the first rule of being a publisher monetizing with Adsense is: don't talk about Adsense.

Where did you get that rule? Maybe you are thinking of not begging users to click ads just to support the site.

You mean a $1 CPM. Mainstream media sites are able to sell at $5-25 CPM, but if you just slap a Google banner on your site, I guess that's about the norm these days.

CPM means Cost Per Mille, while CPV means Cost Per View.

CPM is more common metrics in showing ads. Most networks that sell on a CPV model use adware to do so.

I have to wonder how much of this is by not being genuine about asking for donations. I didn't see the buttons on the page so not sure how this was done but asking for donations can work if you are genuine about asking for them.

The best example I can think of is on the no agenda show. They literally have a segment of the podcast where the hosts ask for money. Its not begging, but a genuine "Provide money for value" proposition. You can hear about this business model on this podcast (Techzing) http://techzinglive.com/page/235/techzing-50-the-real-dvorak

Another lesser example I can think of is Cord Killers which uses a middleman (patreon) http://www.cordkillers.com/ but is essentially the same idea, where you ask for support and if you don't get it you don't provide the service.

It's possible this only works for people with existing audiences though as both the examples did.

I'm very curious how much bitcoin traffic "normal" businesses actually see. (You know, non-bitcoin, non-privacy companies selling mundane products.)

I suspect very little since everyone I know who talks about bitcoin is holding but maybe one of you out there has actual numbers.

I still run a few eCommerce stores in various niches that take 5-15 orders a day. Not high volume, but still active. They mostly have the same checkout flow, with a credit card payment form, alongside "Pay with PayPal" and "Check out with Amazon" buttons on the side, which do get used frequently. I added a "Pay with Bitcoin" button from Coinbase under those several months ago, and a grand total of one person has ever used it, and that person spent about $2 on the cheapest thing I sell.

I'll give you buyer's side. When BTC was over $1000 I was buying things left and right (Namecheap, Gyft etc etc). Now that BTC is hovering around $400-600 I am in a holding pattern.

As top post alludes it is very hard for someone new to BTC to buy BTC in a reasonable manner without expensive surcharges. Mass adoption will not happen until someone comes up with a clever solution to this.

The begging model definitely does not work, and it is a disservice to yourself and any other stakeholders in your site. It annoys users and produces minuscule revenue compared to advertising.

While some will disagree with me, a perfect example of this is Wikipedia. They could implement ads without any of the nonsensical negative consequences they claim to be afraid of and generate billions of dollars in the process. That money could go to improving and supporting the site, and since they don't seem to want profits, to massive donations to causes important to Wikipedia and its users. Unfortunately, they have chosen to annoy users and deprive important causes of billions of dollars.

Just say no to begging.

Wikipedia begging really annoys me

We should talk William. I run CentUp.org and we use standard currency versus something like Butcoin. Half the battle is having people be able to pay you easily (BTC is not an easy option for the average consumer) and the other half is incentivizing your audience to give you donations. I'm Len at CentUp dot org if you want to chat.

I'll be in touch. I'm open to anything at this point. This whole bitcoin donation thing was a great experiment and I would really like to pay for the site without any ads. I hate ads.

Expecting an immediate return of investment is a little naive at best and stupid at worst. Such a change has to be communicated properly to visitors. They have to be accustomed to the donation option. Most probably are not aware of BitCoin, or have heard bad things about it. Sounds like he didn't want it to succeed.

I truly did want it to succeed, but I'm a content guy, not a business guy. Maybe that's my problem. I'm 1 guy trying to do the job of 5-10 people while holding down a demanding day job.

Woah, that was weird. This thread was #1 for around an hour and it jumped down to #37 almost instantly. I wonder what happened. Can an admin explain? I'm genuinely curious about the algorithm that would cause this.

How many monthly pageviews are you receiving? What percentage of your userbase has bitcoin fund available?

Of course it didn't work...

Bigger point: ads amount to not being paid for your work on your site but just being paid to hock crap to suckers. By making a cool site, the sleazy ad biz thinks you're cool enough to be one of their salesman. Despite the intertwining, you are getting paid to be a sleazy salesperson and you are making a cool website on the side. Making cool websites is hard to make pay the bills. Putting ads in people's faces is just one of many bullshit things you could do to otherwise pay your bills.

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