Donation questions
Since you folks have been so helpful in prior discussions…
I’m considering changing the donation process on the site. Let me state for the record that I have no intention of making a mandated donation amount. Donations will remain flexible, and you should be able to donate any amount of money you feel like.
Having said that…
Each months, I get a handful (if that many) of $1.00 donations. Hey, any donation is a donation, right? But PayPal takes anywhere from $0.33 to $.50 out of that off the top. Ouch. So obviously, we need a better solution, as I’m interested in supporting the authors more than just sticking transaction costs in PayPal’s pockets. One option is restricting donation amounts to say $5.00 or higher. Another is finding an alternate payment method for “micropayments”.
On the flipside of this is my consideration of actually raising the “default” amount. It’s $9.99 right now, and most donations come in for that amount. But a few (many more than the dollar-donors) come in for significantly more. Those two things lead me to the following conclusions:
-
The default amount will be the most-donated amount
A higher default rate is acceptable to many
But what I have no feel for is this: how many people will not even consider donating if I make it say… $14.99 as the default? Yes, they can change it down, but will it be dismissed out of hand if the listed price point is above their decision threshold? A conundrum, and I’d love to hear some discussion from authors on the site and listeners alike.
January 27th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I think you should follow magnatune’s lead on this one. Charge half of the price of an average audiobook as the default– unfortunately that comes right out to about 10 or 15 dollars–
From my perspective I’d say 15 dollars seems reasonable. Audiobooks are expensive pieces of work that people spend a lot of time making.
January 27th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I guess I’ll give my opinion… though I can’t really back it up. Just a gut feeling. I would not raise the suggested donation. And, I’m not commenting on the value of the work here by any means. I guess ten bucks just seems like a good swivel point. It may just be low self esteem talking, but I’d rather someone think, “wow, what a bargain,” than “well, I guess its worth that.” I think people feel good about being able to give the suggested amount, and I’m just afraid that 15 beans would raise a lot more eyebrows than 10. Take this with a grain of salt, though, because even ten dollars is a lot of money to me. I encourage the users of the site to give their opinion on this, as I feel their input would be the most useful.
January 28th, 2006 at 5:24 am
Hi
I understand that with each new title added bandwidth costs will increase so I wish to suggest an Open Source RSS bandwidth costing saving measure.
http://www.dijjer.org/faq.php#podcasting
January 28th, 2006 at 5:52 am
Why not have two, or more buttons? One for the current $ amount, and another for the $14.99.
This would say, to me at least, that you are happy to take the lower amount. I think your higher level donations will actually increase.
What I would like is the ability to make a single donation and have is split between several books. Either evenly or manually selectable. That way I can make donations to the nine authors I’m subscribed to, and you only lose one transaction fee to PayPal.
I believe PayPal also supports subscriptions. What about an option to make a donation every month, to be divided between the books that I’m currently subscribed to.
Which reminds me, I feel I owe you a donation for all these fantastic books. Thanks.
January 28th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Chrisitiaan -
Your terminology is a little off. You’re talking about a Content Distribution Network. Things like Dijjer and Coral are great, but they require port different than standard HTTP traffic travels upon. As such, network administrators of organizations and companies block access to any ports other than those essential for standard network travel. If it doesn’t travel on Port 80 or some other port used for some standard business need, network admins will have it locked down.
Dijjer requires admins open port 9115. Anyone trying to get a file behind a firewall with that port closed will be unsuccessful. I’ve tried this with Coral in the past. Great tool. Great concept. But problematic. If a CDN goes with port 80, we’ll be all over it.
The good news is that my relationship with the wonderful folks at LibSyn make this, for now, a non issue. If you’ve got a podcast (other than a podiobook) and you’re not using LibSyn… why? Cheap, effective and reliable. I’m happy as a clam with the guys. http://libsyn.com
Paul - The concept about one donations split is a good idea. We’ve talked about it, but never with anything concrete. We’ll take your ideas and use them as spring board. Thanks!
January 30th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
I think the idea of offering several different donation levels is a good one — as is the “subscription” model.
If you’re going to go with subscriptions, create several different levels so that people of different income levels can feel comfortable. Give each level a nice name, too… something like “Supporter,” “Patron,” “Superstar,” “Angel,” “Archangel,” and so on. Offer to provide links back to folks at the Angel and Archangel level.
Too complicated?
If you’re going to have one suggested donation level, keep it under $15.00. Fifteen is just a little too close emotionally to Twenty, and might make people balk.