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

48 points

12 years ago

6 days ago I posted http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/202pts/im_taking_the_ads_off_my_popular_website_and/ ) about taking all the ads off my website ( http://www.spaceindustrynews.com ) and replacing them with donation links for BTC. I plan on doing this for 6 months and at that time if I'm not making enough money to keep the servers up I'll have to switch back to a traditional model.

Here's a recap of what has happened and what I've learned so far from my experience.

I've received some very positive feedback about my move away from traditional advertising to a donation based format. I've been contacted by numerous people in the industry ( NASA, etc. ) about this. They are truly intrigued and didn't really understand how I was going to keep the lights on.

The BTC community has been overwhelmingly supportive through this transition as well. I've gotten so many PMs from people that have built systems for easier BTC integration and I'm truly grateful for that.

How much BTC has been donated so far? Day 1: I received 0.0125 BTC which equals ~ $8.00 USD. Day 2: 0.0015 BTC = ~ $0.95 USD Day 3: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD Day 4: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD Day 5: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD Day 6: 0.00 BTC = $0.00USD

There are probably a few reasons for this. One is that after the initial post moved down the page less BTC influencers were coming to the site. My normal audience comes from links and Google so who knows if they user BTC at all.

This news doesn't halt me one bit. I'm in this for a while and will continue doing what is right and what is good. Like I said before, this is still only a few days old so there will be design changes, traffic changes. I'm still 100% behind BTC!

Thank you for the donations, I really do appreciate it.

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