What I learned by switching to Bitcoin donations instead of traditional ads

I'm not any the wiser, as you don't mention what your average ad revenue is like.

Sounds like the trend, starting on day 3, is quite clear. It's not surprising, donations usually don't work.

Whilst a interesting move I would suggest offering donations via alternative means, PAYPAL, postal cheque even being two that spring to mind. Have a donate button that links to the options. Then you will get a better feel of how the donation model works instead of limiting to bitcoins. Which in some countries would be illegal I believe. Not sure what the geographic distrabution of bitcoins is, or if that information is mineable in any way beyond maybe memberlists from mining pools.

I'm developing a new service (Bitcoin related). At first I was considering BTC donations being the only form of income, but I've noticed every time I look up a BTC donation address there's little to no money transferred to it, even for popular websites. I think I'm going to use a percentage of each transaction as payment instead...

What did the site look like with ads?

Have you considered making ads less intrusive? There are networks like this http://decknetwork.net that stipulate one small jpg ad per page.

Where do you get the content? Do you write any yourself? This looks like an aggregator/content farm. Why should I support that?

Coinbase allows recurring payments, you can ask people to subscribe essentially.

Ultimately I don't think it's very convenient for a large number of visitors, but you can probably get your $20 a day. Flattr was supposed to be micropayments for likes and it didn't work. With Bitcoin/DOGE there is a more passionate crowd that will donate if only to promote bitcoin and increase transaction volume.

While way too many websites have turned advertising into something 'bad', it doesn't have to be that way. Sites like Smashing Magazine and such offer non-intrusive advertising that displays services people might want to use.

Advertising in and of itself is not evil, it's how people have chosen to utilize it that's given it a bad rap.

One thing, it's impossible to see the footer on your website with the infinite scrolling.

This is one of the primary purposes for developing valME.io - to give quality content providers a better way to make money from doing exactly what they already do, and without advertising. You can read about the details here: http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works/ and the genesis of the idea here: http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/pkqqs/the-genesis-of-va.... We would welcome your content and be happy to give you a free community called /SpaceIndustryNews (or whatever you want to call it). If you're interested, when you register, just indicate it's you.

Makes me really hopeful for Tidbit to succeed and become more widely adopted and accepted...I know that I plan to implement it on my sites (default off with opt in of course).

http://tidbit.co.in

I recommend supporting other cryptocurrencies, particularly dogecoin.

This is a marketing plan, not a business plan.

Accept other forms of payment. If you feel strongly about Bitcoin, that's great. Accept it as a payment form. Advertise to all bitcoin savvy users. But you are destining yourself to fail by only accepting Bitcoin.

Also, not sure your readership. But it probably makes more sense to do a subscription, cause someone that sends you a few dollars won't likely send you more. And your regulars are the ones who will pay. Not the random-google-passer-by.

You should strongly consider making a product and selling it, then using spaceindustrynews.com as a friendcatcher for that product. This lets you have a virtually ad-free experience for that site (with the exception of a few plugs for the house product every once in a while), and would probably be substantially more lucrative than donations or webmaster welfare (AdWords in a non-commercial niche). It will likely sell to a fraction of a percent of your audience, but given that rather more than that is people with high-paying jobs in e.g. engineering or the space industry, amounts of money which are lifechanging for you (when aggregated) are still pretty small beer for them.

Good luck. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks for sharing the results so far. The problem with accepting bitcoin on a site that doesn't have anything to do with bitcoin, is that you're limiting your audience.

I would venture that only 1 - 5% of your visitors even have bitcoin. So basically, you're trying to get donations from only 10 to 50 users for every 1,000 visitors you get. If we then assume that 1% of those visitors will donate $1, you are looking at only $1 to $5 for every 10,000 visitors.

This just doesn't make sense from a business perspective. I would include other ways to make donations.

I hope this works out for you. I'd really like to see micro-transactions replace advertizing as the primary revenue source of the web. I'm afraid your experience so far shows that we haven't reached that tipping point yet. What percentage of your audience even has any bitcoin to donate? It has to be 1000 times more frictionless before I see this working outside of a niche (that you don't seem to be in).

Good luck.

Have you considered adding dogecoin and/or litecoin? The inflationary nature of dogecoin lends itself to a higher transaction volume than bitcoin, whereas bitcoin inherently encourages hoarding, not to mention the overwhelmingly generous nature of the dogecoin community in general.