+1
Surely just a small handful of folks donating a few bucks through patreon or whatever, could keep the site ticking over with no ads.
Surely just a small handful of folks donating a few bucks through patreon or whatever, could keep the site ticking over with no ads.
My website has generated quite a bit of goodwill in my community. It saves people considerable stress.
Donations make up less than a percent of my income. About one in ten or twenty thousand visitors donates. It does not cover my grocery bill. Even readers I personally advise rarely donate.
'The bare minimum hosting cost' is a pretty poor bar for informational content.
I wonder what Sheldon would have wanted. I was always under the impression that he saw it as a community service. Despite working at a bike shop he never seemed to push parts sales in his writings.
I think its entirely possible to recover the costs of a hobby that does public good through donations. Making a reasonable wage (especially by software dev standards) is another matter entirely.
Donations seem to do fine for my local makerspace, and local cycling advocacy group. Maybe this site, which for a lot of people would amount to an online memorial, is somehow different?
So, total donations were by about 20 people who really funded all of it, the total take for that was distinctly under £1000. At the time that site had between 2 and 4 million views a month. tl;dr few people will consider paying, far fewer will actually pay, even when it benefits them in the long term.
What really upset me about that is if everyone who looked at that charitable request and had simply coughed up £1, and most of them could (sometimes you can't; I've been in that position so I understand) a real difference could have been made.
If a charitable health-based cause pulls in so little cash, even fewer people will donate just to keep a site running.