One thing I don't understand about monetizing on the Internet.

I see the author considered ads, tried an affiliate scheme and even did an NFT. But what about plain old, honest to God payment? Couldn't they just put a paragraph of text on the site, "Hey folks, I'm worried about hosting costs, if you find this page useful, please [Donate]", with a button redirecting to Paypal or Stripe or whatever, collect the money and declare it as donations on the IRS form? Why try all these convoluted schemes, instead of giving a straightforward way for people to tip?

They had 50 million views. If 0.01% of these visitors left a dollar, the author would've still come up way ahead over all the crazy schemes, even post-tax.

oefrha

If my developer tool with thousands of stars on GitHub generates $15/yr in donations, I would say 0.01% of visitors each donating $1 to a website they on average spend 1 minute or less on (seems a reasonable assumption?) is far too optimistic.

TeMPOraL

Can you give any other metric for its popularity? Stars aren't a good one - Github stars are bookmarks, not a reflection of whether one actually uses a given repository. Personally, I have 301 starred repositories, of which I maybe use... 5?

gravyboat

I'm one of the maintainers of Streamlink [1] which has members from around the world and we've been running various methods of donation since 2017 or so. In that time our Open Collective [2] has made about $1600 USD. We have 6k+ stars, and over 50,000 users across all platforms (based on download stats as we don't collect any metrics in our apps so it's potentially higher) yet the entire amount we've collected is thanks to less than 100 people. We note the Open Collective on every release as well, and have donation links in the documentation.

My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software.

[1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink