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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

The negative to this is similar to the negative of Flattr, you're giving a prominent position to a button/brand other than your own for less than the value of that space. On Adam Corolla's site, he's got it in the top banner, a very prominent position. It's only gotten him $3.30* in exchange, a very cheap ad buy.

It will be interesting to see how these perform after a week and a month vs just placing a small ad there. Especially after the $2,000 they gave away to spur usage is used up. I'd wager these will only bring in a small fraction of what an ad would.

One positive over Flattr, though, is at least you can see how much that ad position is paying out as a visitor. 1 Flattr doesn't have a direct connection to dollars.

* - I'd originally forgotten the default tip is 10 cents, not $1. Updated with the 1/10th value appropriately.

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This is really good point -- these buttons really ARE advertisements. Personally, I've had a hard time figuring out how to get any ads on my personal blog. The costs of hosting are very low (about $75 including AWS, a cheap SSL cert, and DNS). It should be easy to break even However, because my blog has so few impressions and is hosted on a subdomain (bryce.fisher-fleig.org) I can't use Google Adsense. Flattr or Coinbase could be great for hard-monetize situations.

Does AdSense really not allow ads on subdomains?

Note that I was off by a factor of ten and the site has made under 4 bucks for a sitewide banner ad.

Do ad blockers typically remove things like Flattr or potentially this Coinbase tip button? You're right about this being a cheap ad by but if there is a high correlation between bitcoin and the use of ad blockers and these tip buttons aren't blocked this could be an acceptable alternative.

It depends on the ads and the blocker. Many adblockers make allowances for non-intrusive text-based ads now. If users are more concerned with privacy, they'll block not only ads but social media widgets and buttons like these, since they can all be used to track users across various sites.

As a followup, two days later, Adam Corolla's site only has ~30,000 bits tipped. Around $10. For 2 days as a sitewide (micro)button banner ad.

The space needed however is miniscule. You would be lucky to get any ad dollars whatever for a 1 inch by 1 inch web space.

There are web ads specifically for this type of size. They're called buttons (120x60 and similar) and micro-buttons (88x31). They generally pay better than any of these micro-donation widgets I've seen.

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