Making money blogging - donation system idea

July 22, 2008

I posted over at http://mashable.com/2008/07/22/3-ways-to-make-more-money-blogging/ but wanted to expand on the idea there in more detail.  The mashable article was linked to http://www.centernetworks.com/online-advertising-interaction which has a few more comments on the same topic: Advertising as monetization for blog content.

The author from centernetworks does a reasonable job of pitching his case - the trend, especially in tech circles, to block ads and avoid ever clicking on ads is hurting and will further hurt ad- and sponsor-driven content.  One might question the wisdom of getting in to a business whose entire revenue model is ad-driven, and which hasn’t been ‘proven’ except for a handful of sites which tend to prove the exception to the rule more than anything else (slashdot, techcrunch, readwriteweb, gigaom, etc.).  But, many people are choosing to go down that route anyway, whether part time or full time.  So what’s a blog author to do?

I’ve experimented multiple times with text and banner ads, and they never do well enough.  I don’t get huge amounts of traffic - perhaps 5-10k page views on my blog per month.  I’ve noticed there are times when I write a lot where I get more traffic, but it’s not a direct relationship, at least in my case.  I’ve written a lot of what I considered to be reasonable quality material which never gets visited, then some months I get a lot of traffic from stupid one-off posts.  I’ve recently turned to a ‘buy me a coffee’ donation solicitation approach (well, buy me a hot chocolate, too much coffee makes me sick!) and we’ll see how that goes.  I do know that I used to take donations on a reasonably popular search engine tool (keywordcount.com - very popular back in the day) and after about 50,000 unique visitors I’d had about $42 in donations.  Even a $5 CPM (wouldn’t have been hard in those days at all) would have been $250.  Donations didn’t seem the way to go then, and I’m not sure now either, but again, we’ll see.

But that got me to thinking about the donation model re: blogging.  The model is pretty inefficient, in that paypal (for example) is taking a moderate cut (especially on $3 donations), and the donator has to donate in singular fashion to multiple sites which they might want to support.  Wouldn’t a group ‘tip jar’ approach make more sense?  There are a few ways I can see this happening, and I’m not really anxious to start ‘yet another project which needs large amounts of eyeballs and buy-in to make any headway at all only to be copied by someone else in 2 days’ ™.  This idea could be implemented through someone like bloglines in a fairly straightforward fashion.

Anyone who wants to accept donations for content in a feed would register with bloglines (for example).  Readers viewing those feeds which accept donations would see a ‘make a donation’ button.  Seems simple enough, and not much different than individual donations, right?  The main twist I see here is that bloglines could allow the visitor to make donations to multiple feed authors at the same time.  So my $12 donation could be split up amongst 10 feeds I select.  Or let me make a one time donation of $80, split across everyone in my OPML (which accepts donations).

The ‘registration’ part would be even easier, because the information could be embedded right in the feed.  Devising a standard ‘<rss:donate’ info tag shouldn’t be too hard.  Either info directly embedded in the feed itself, or a link to a file on a particular site, and donation info is ‘registered’ with the particular donation-handling service.

A standard fee of 10% or something similar to cover the processing and adminsitrative costs would be taken off, and the rest split up however the donator wished.  All to one feed, evenly split amongst all feeds in my reader, manually entered percentages, etc.

Perhaps there are services out there that could be adapted to fit this idea quickly?  Or perhaps bloglines, newsgator, Google reader or some other established reader program could run with this idea?

What do you think?

Posted in Business, Ideas, Software, Web