Written on February 23rd, 2006 at 07:02 am by Darren Rowse
Can a Blogger Live off Donations?
Jason Kottke reflects on the year that he asked his readers to support him through donations in a post titled Oh, what a year. His three week fund drive earned $39,900 from 1450 donations.
Is he going to do it again?
‘I’m not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me.’
13 Responses to “Can a Blogger Live off Donations?”
Michael Hampton
February 23rd, 2006 9:28 am
If everyone who read my site actually made a donation, I’d have about $40,000 as well. Unfortunately, the response rate is about 1% or so.
This just means I need to be about 100 times bigger. :)
Joe Taylor Jr.
February 23rd, 2006 9:37 am
As someone that moved to online-only work after almost ten years in public radio, I can assure you that fund drives are no fun. However, I think there’s a bright spot that Jason’s moving on because his interest is shifting elsewhere, not because there was a paucity of support.
kioshi
February 23rd, 2006 1:11 pm
Oh I’d love that. I have been sick for 1 year, unable to work (I am a doctor) and since then I’ve been making all kind of websites to try to earn something via adsense or so. I spend 16 hours/day online (I can’t go anywhere anyway) trying to post useful content (not those hateful splogs), never asked for donations, but I guess I’m just not good at attracting traffic except for my Brazilian sites - and here in Brazil most people do not even know about Paypal and stuff.
This guy is lucky. He must have had a good reason to ask for donations (I’ll still read it), but I don’t think many people can pull this out, whatever the motive.
Cheers!
mark
February 23rd, 2006 3:44 pm
wow, just wow! His readers are quite generous indeed.
A.H
February 23rd, 2006 10:38 pm
I love kottke.org, it’s one of the blogs i really have joy in reading. Not especially because of the content itself (it’s not bad), But because of the way it’s laid…and the wonderful design of course =)
A.H
Victor
February 24th, 2006 2:04 am
That’s incredible. Unless I had a very good reason to, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable asking for money from readers (not that I’d get much at this point anyway).
$40k in 3 weeks..*one can dream I suppose*
Steve
February 24th, 2006 2:32 am
Although I don’t know for sure what his traffic is like, based on his Alexa chart compared to my own, and looking at my own adsense earnings, I’m sure that if he’d taken the “evil” step of adding adsense and maybe an affiliate program or two to his site at the beginning of last year, he probably could have doubled his income.
Stephen
February 24th, 2006 5:34 pm
Hey Peter, why don’t you just plug your site again, in case we missed it first time? Sheesh, talk about off topic.
Darren Rowse
February 24th, 2006 10:07 pm
Peter’s comments were deleted for being a little too much like spam for my liking.
Dave Starr
February 26th, 2006 5:54 am
This is indeed an interesting subject. My first line of thought is always (as many have said) donations are something I wouldn’t care to ask for.
However, since the blogging community is rather new and tends to be close-knit, I wonder how many have happened upon two other “blogs” that have shaped many of my online experiences, some since the earliest days of the ‘Net.
Dr. Jerry Pournelle has written a magazine column for Byte Magazine in it’s various incarnation for well over 20 years. He put a ‘Day Book’ on line many. many years ago and has always asked for contributions .. which he certainly gets. His site stylizes itself ‘the original blog’. Jerry’s been ‘blogging’ since before most modern day bloggers were even born.
Robert Bruce ‘Bob’ Thompson is a writer of computer books and he has had a somewhat traditional daily journal on line since long before the word ‘Blog’ was coined. He operates on the two stage model, free basic service to all, ‘extras’ to paid subscribers.
There are others successful publishing for donations since long before we had defined a blog (oh, have we done that yet? ;-))
butlimous
June 25th, 2007 7:30 pm
I think it not easy at all to convince people to donate for a blogger so a blogger can’t definitely live of donations! Thanks for writing
liz wolf
March 5th, 2008 7:10 pm
i think it can’t hurt to ask! I’m sure there’s a way, probably have even read about it (not paypal) where you can just throw a penny or two someone’s way. it would have to be easy. I’d don’t know, just a newbie. Sometimes it seems if it is really quick and easy I’d be more likely to do it. sort of like a tip jar.
Kathy Lester
March 14th, 2008 2:53 pm
I have a tip jar on my site and have not received any donations. What did he say to cause people to give him almost $40,000?
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