Personally, the concept of donating money to people whose online content you enjoy and benefit from has always seemed noble and sophisticated. My ideal model for a donation system is as follows. Someone does something amazing, with no intention of receiving any money for it, and then money magically appears in their possession, unannounced and unexpected. They profess infinite gratitude, the people who donated reassure them that they’re worth the (individually) small expense, and everyone gets on with their busy lives – the recipient now able to pay for whatever costs were encountered whilst producing the content in question.
However, ideals are usually figments of overoptimistic minds, and big problems with the above scenario are that: money doesn’t magically appear, sent through some sort of financial ether at a mere thought on the part of the appreciative party; and amazing, donation-worthy content is hard to come by.
I’ve always been apprehensive about asking for donations. Actually, I should rephrase that: I’ve always been apprehensive about appearing to think that I’m worth donating money to. Adding a big, shiny “DONATE” button to this blog has never felt right – it’s like I’m commanding my readers to donate something large out of obligation.1 And yes, I do have a link in the right sidebar to my Book Depository wishlist, but that’s always been easier for me to justify: many of the topics I both write about and learn in order to eventually write about on here are the focus of numerous books, some of them good, some of them terrible, all of them somewhat necessary for my self-motivated, informal education. I know I’m going to buy them all eventually, so having them bought for me does technically save me money in the long run.
But books are expensive – or at least expensive relative to the average amount of money the average appreciative person would want to spend on a young, inexperienced blogger with little to offer intellectually both those who agree and disagree with his contentions – and who wants to pay AUS$35 for a 10 year-old discredited book on probability, information theory and intelligent design? Most people probably think that’s like flushing money down a pseudoscientific toilet. Books with intellectual merit usually – and sadly – cost even more.
I still don’t like asking for monetary donations though. “Why would anyone want to give me money?” I think constantly.
Unfortunately this blog isn’t free to run, and I’m a university student who has only recently begun to realise how much financial trouble he will be in in a few years if he doesn’t start making every last dollar count. But if large monetary donations are out of the question, as are donations-in-book-form, what’s left?
Micro-donations seem to fit the bill. They don’t ease my awkwardness completely, as the process still involves people giving me money for (what I perceive as) no good reason, but at least the amount is small, so I don’t feel like I’m asking for much. Actually, I’m not really asking at all – in my ideal donation model the content producer is wonderfully surprised by the donations. For that to happen, I need to have absolutely no expectations at all that people will donate.
The micro-donation service I’ve decided to use is called Flattr. You can find out more here, but in essence, you (the donor) add a self-determined amount of money to an account and every month money is split between the people and content you chose to “flattr” by clicking on specific buttons on their site, like the one below.
There are obvious benefits and drawbacks to this. The benefits are that you can give small rewards to things you think deserve them – blog posts that made you think, videos that made you laugh, etc. – and you’ll never spend, in total, over the amount you set yourself every month. The big drawback is that it seems like a bit of a waste of time and effort to set up an account with Flattr if you’re only going to be donating to one or two things: not everyone uses Flattr as their donation system and you can’t donate to them unless they do. The number of people using the system is growing all the time, but it’ll be a while before it becomes the dominant system (if it ever does at all).
I’ll let you decide if you want to join up or not. Remember, I’m not expecting any donations. This is merely facilitation on my part – and it was hard enough to talk myself into doing even that.
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- Sure, I’ve had one up in the past, but it wasn’t there for long. ↩
