Experience with donate buttons?

Do user really use paypal donate buttons and contribute?

[javahava]

Hi there,

I've been considering using a paypal or amazon donate button. has anyone had any experiences good / useless with them? what % of users you think would donate, for a free, good content site about how to use widgets, for example. any references or stats about these programs would be most helpful. thanks!

[rogerd]

Hi, javahava. This site had a donate button for a while, and then went to a more formal subscription model. I assume that was because the donate button was used by a small percentage of the visitors.

I don't have stats, but I'd guess if your site was really useful to people you might get enough donations to cover your hosting & bandwidth, but I'd be surprised if the return was sufficient to generate major income for you. Your success will depend on the audience, how useful the site is to them, how well you personally "bond" with them (my guess is that people donated here to recognize Brett's efforts, not to the more abstract concept of WebmasterWorld), and what their resources are.

[2_much]

I used it on a non-profit site for about 6 months, and got less than a handful of donations. It was prominently placed, with a nice explanation about the benefits of donating, but it still didn't work.
One reason is that a large portion of our visitors are from AOL ISP and can't figure out how paypal works.
The other reason I can think of is that donations work mainly with communities such as this one, where there's an active exchange of ideas and support. Ours is a meditation center and our web portion isn't entirely community based, so that might've been the problem.
You could try it, but if you're trying to make money out of your site, Adsense might be the way to go.

[Yidaki]

>I used it on a non-profit site for about 6 months, and got less than a handful of donations.

Do you remember how much visitors / impressions the donate button had, 2_much ... per month?

[Chef_Brian]

Hello,

Yes when I started with my main content site I worked with several different set-ups to try to make a few bucks while continuing to add my own personel content to my site.

I spent too many hours working on making my chef site the best dam personal chef site on the net. Recipes, information about ingredients, articles and on and on.

Bottom line is for me and many other content sites people just don't care when they can get it for free. I am sure many of my visitors did not even realize they were not contributing. They were there for a recipe, found it and were gone.

I worked for about 6 to 9 months to learn how to incorperate affiliate sites and links into my chef site to be able to continue with my "master" plan. It was not easy but by thinking through my visitors and seeing what they would and would not click/buy/visit I became vary aware of my visitors.

Be careful with the donation stuff, you might be better off to just create a sales site for a good affiliate product and link to that site instead of trying to get your currect visitors to reach into there pockets.

Good luck,

Brian

[JollyK]

Yeah, taking donations is not a good business model, I'm afraid. I started taking donations on one site about a year or two ago, and it never even paid the web hosting bills.

I also noticed that out of the people who asked for (and received) the most support, maybe 1 out of 200 or so donated. In fact, most donations came from people who had never contacted me for help or anything.

Truly bizarre.

In addition to PayPal, I also set up an "Amazon Honor System" thingy for donations, thinking that lots of people probably already have an Amazon account, and so wouldn't have to go through the PayPal hoops. Didn't make a difference -- most donations go through PayPal anyway.

I think the only way to increase donations is to have something of value that you only get when you donate. Trusting to the generosity or gratitude of people simply won't get you very far.

I have heard, though, that sites which seem more personal and friendly may bring in more donations than sites that seem more "professional." I've been doing my site for free since about 1994, and have been paying for hosting since 1996, and the first time the site didn't cost me anything was after I took on AdSense. :-)