Donations - do people actually donate funds?

I've been getting a fairly consistent amount of traffic to my tutorial site, and while it is getting a bit of Adsense income, I know the site could be bringing in more income.

Has anyone found this to have value for them?

Does it generally require a freebie to get folks to donate?

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I am not really sure how donations work with a site, but I think you need to give some motivation in order to make people donate funds to your site.

For instance here at webdigity people donate funds because this way they get a link to their site from the donation page. But there are a few that have donated because of some good tutorial or because they got some quick answer to a problem they had.

With that in mind I suppose that donations works better for community web sites.

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And some also donate because they want to feel they belong, so try not to lose the community feel... and always respond to your visitors...

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I guess the simple donation buttons are noty working, I have on my site > 250.000 free script downloads and maybe 5 or 6 donations.

I know from other programmers that this is normal. I think it's easier to ask for some bucks to get a link than waiting to become rich because of donations. (maybe I should replace these donation buttons with some ad button )

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i use a "buy me a beer" script in one of my site just this month. so far, zero.

This is one of the questions that came to my mind recently... don't have experience around that...

I think it's not easy to make money by the Donation. Most come to your tutorial  just for free, few will denote.
But to  make a try will take you nothing,maybe you have a good luck.

the answer is yes but donation is not a revenue stream
Donations are a thankyou to the writer for providing a great tutorial given how few people say thankyou much less do anything more you wouldn't want to rely on it for money!

However I have done well with buy me a beer button on tutorial sites (well before the plugin) I maybe got a free pint every other week.

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I will agree with Tim. Donations is not a revenue stream unless if you own a site like wikipedia

Of course some easy cash can't harm you in any way

You are both right, revenue stream was not a good choice of words. I still haven't tried this, but I may give it a go.

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i removed mine. its just a waste of space for me.

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