Asking Site Visitors for Donations

Is requesting donations an ethical and viable method of profiting from your website’s traffic? And we’re not begging the question from the perspective of a non-profit (i.e., not-for-profit) organization disguised as an enterprise, no pun intended. In other words, should a business shy away from asking its site visitors for donations, naturally at their sole discretion (and obviously in exchange for the perceived value offered [such as quality content, a downloadable application, etc]). The latter might be free & publicly available, but if it’s good enough (and morally acceptable enough) to justify a generous tip here and there, then why not?

To illustrate further, while crowdfunding is entirely different from asking your website visitors for donations (given that any monies received must be exchanged for a clearly defined good or service in the case of the former), the general sentiment is the same. Where it differs (aside from a contract) is that, with donations, you’re delivering goods/services before experiencing any financial transactions (albeit single-sided ones) you’d be lucky enough to be on the receiving end of. Speaking of luck… Is it purely based on luck?

Since virtually everything statistics-related on the net is, almost by definition, a numbers game, it’s safe to say that approximate income can be calculated (or at least anticipated) based on certain key factors. Regarding sites, they tend to be traffic-generation (with the number of unique visitors per day, especially), the quality of the free product(s) being delivered, and the intuitiveness (and range) of payment processing involved.

If a website visitor trusts you and, ideally, hears from you regularly, then, at a certain point, s/he may decide to buy one or more of your products. If you’re not directly selling anything, but you do have a ‘Donate Now’ button placed somewhere alongside your content/app-related items (i.e., blog posts, static-page articles, plugins, software, etc) created by means of the highest possible degree of integrity… there’s a relatively good chance they’ll be enticed to help you out with a little pourboire (with suggested amounts potentially pre-set by you, the publisher).