Much ballywho is often made over the promise of micro-payment or “tipping” flavored monetization models online. The consensus view is that if you can just crack the code and lower the barrier enough for tipping to become dead-simple, then the floodgates of donations will start pouring in. A more bleak (but realistic) view is outlined in an article over at MonetizeThis. In the real world you get tipped when you make eye contact. A bigger crowd doesn’t always mean more tips. Tipping creates price uncertainty. Why pay for something that’s free?

A scary thought experiment…

Wikipedia is entirely supported by donations. So why isn’t it a good model for everyone else? Last year they raised $6.2 million from 125,000 donors. While that’s a lot of money and more than covers their operating budget for the year, Wikipedia gets 190 million visitors a day. Think about that for a second, one of the most import information sources in human history with daily traffic bigger than most nations only got 125,000 donors? How much is one of Wikipedia’s 5 billion monthly visitors worth when it comes time to donate? $.00124. That’s a fraction of a penny. If you’re providing a human experience enriching service on par with Wikipedia, multiply your total audience size by $.00124 to figure out how much you can expect to make from donations. That comes to about 8 million people to stay above the poverty level ($10,000). Wikipedia’s efforts worked well enough, but it’s a frightening proposition for anyone who doesn’t one of the most trafficked websites on the planet.