This blog is hosted on WordPress.com. This has its advantages, but it means that I can’t use the huge range of add-ins that are available to those that host their own WordPress server. In my attempts to find a simple way to add social bookmarking to WordPress posts I stumbled across GetSocial, a Windows desktop program that generates the social bookmarking icons you see at the bottom of my recent posts. GetSocial is donationware – the author requests a small donation if you find the software useful. But the software is not crippled or time limited in any way and the donation is optional. I found the software useful so I made a small donation.

I use a number of donationware products. Human nature being what it is, I rarely get round to making donations – despite the best of intentions. It just never quite makes it to the top of my ever expanding TODO list. I have also heard various tales about how dismal the donation rates are. So I was curious about how well the donationware model works in this particular case. I emailed the author of GetSocial, Hillel Stoler, and he was kind enough to do this interview.

What was the motivation behind GetSocial?

GetSocial is not a business – it’s my contribution to the WordPress.com community. I needed a way to generate social bookmarking buttons for my own blog, and when I saw none was available I made GetSocial. I decided to request donations because I too was curious about the feasibility of donationware, and wanted to investigate the subject. I hate spammy “business models” such as installing Toolbars, embedding ads and so forth and wanted to make software that I would like to use.

Does anyone actually make a donation?

Surprisingly, yes. Many people donate, and I think all of them are glad to do so.

What is the average donation?

At the beginning I was only asking for a fixed amount (5 USD). The reason for this was that a fixed donation simplifies the donation process (because the potential benefactor needs to make one less decision). I’ve selected 5 USD because it was the lowest sum of money for which the PayPal commissions amounted to less than 10% of the donation.

Recently I’ve enabled donations in different currencies and variable amounts (but only on my websites, donations made from inside the application are still fixed). I’ve seen some decline in the ratio of donations per download (although it could be explained by many factors, and cannot be directly attributed to the added complexity of the process without applying proper A/B testing methods). However, the average donation has increased to 9.19 USD, and I’ve also received donations of over 20 USD. This is interesting because 19.99 USD is enough to purchase many commercial software products. To date, no one has donated less than 5 USD.

What is the donation/download ratio?

First of all, please consider that GetSocial is upgraded frequently, and I cannot differentiate between a new download and an upgrade download. Also, I can only count downloads which originated from my own websites. That said, dividing the number of the donations by the total number of documented downloads yields a donate/download ratio of about 0.55 percent (e.g. a single donation is received on average about every 182 downloads).

Can you make any money out of donationware?

I do make some money out of GetSocial, but I’m far from making a living out of it. With the current donation/download ratio, GetSocial will only begin to become economically interesting when it hits the 500k download mark. It’s not impossible market-size wise (there are about 10 million bloggers in WordPress.com) but it’s not easy.

The amount of money one can make with donationware is directly proportional to the number of people involved. For example, in the case of GetSocial, take a million downloads, divide by 182 and multiply by 5 dollars and you have 27k USD (before PayPal commissions). This amount of money can cover the development costs for many small software products.

That said, a million is a big number, even for free software. If you’re thinking about making real money out of a donation based product, I would recommend that you research the size of your market carefully. Getting those million downloads is not an easy task.

I personally don’t think that money is the sole motivation for doing things though. When discussing profits, we should also take into account the indirect benefits I receive from GetSocial such as incoming links, a user base, visits to my website, comments, world fame (or at least some publicity), and even fan mail!

And hey, the donationware model works for Wikipedia, doesn’t it?

Why did you choose a donation model instead of selling licences?

The reason I made GetSocial was that when I started hillelstoler.com (on a WordPress.com platform), I wanted to add social bookmarking buttons for my visitors. When I realized no one was doing that (there was an old text file floating around for manual use) I decided to make GetSocial. I wanted to attract visitors to my new blog, and I knew that distributing a hyped piece of free software would help me build credibility and acquire an international audience. It did.

Why did you choose donationware over freeware?

Out of curiosity, I guess. I wanted to know if one could make any money this way, and if people actually pay when they don’t have to (especially in cases where no one is looking). Today I can clearly say that I was pleasantly surprised. I think that Donationware is a beautiful (and very user-friendly) concept, and I’m glad it’s not just another web myth. Besides, I knew that people needed GetSocial, but to be honest I didn’t really think that anyone would actually pay for such a service at the time. In the end, I think that my potential buyers are also the ones who made the effort and donated, even though they didn’t have to. I’ve actually received some donations larger than what I could possibly charge if GetSocial was a commercial product!

Another important factor in my decision was the fact that I could do it rather easily. Recall the old days, when Donationware DOS programs asked you to kindly snail-mail some cash to a P.O box? That’s the kind of thing I would never bother with, especially when we’re talking about an international market.

Do you think you have made more money through donations than you would have through selling licences?

Absolutely! When I’ve received my first donation I was surprised (so people do donate after all), and as donations kept pouring in I realized that there is a donation culture. Selling licenses also meant becoming a part-time police officer, and that’s not what I was after.

What really amazed me, is that even in this very specific niche of social bookmarking for WordPress.com blogs (where I offer an industry grade solution for free) competition still sprung!

How did you promote GetSocial?

I didn’t. I’ve posted about it on the WordPress.com forums several times, and wrote about it on my website, hillelstoler.com. Other people wrote about it too. No paid ads or anything like that. You’ll notice that I didn’t even include a link on the toolbar itself (the viral ‘Get one!’ link you see everywhere else) because it was important to me not to impose.

You now have a web version of GetSocial. How long did that take to create compared to the desktop version? How do the desktop and web version compare in terms of the amount of use and the amount of donations?

GetSocial Live (the on-line version) started as a weekend project actually. GetSocial is a Windows application, and many people wanted a Mac version. Since I don’t even own a Mac, I decided to make a cross-platform web service (currently, about 40% of GetSocial Live visitors are indeed Mac users). It was easy to make, because I copied some of the code directly from GetSocial. The images are all photos I took of the plants in my house. In the end it did mean additional costs (hosting, domain, etc), but originally it was hosted for free on (the late) Google Pages service.

Later on, I discovered that the on-line version made GetSocial much more flexible and dynamic. I can now post updates much more quickly and effectively. The web version is also much easier to upgrade and maintain because it lacks some of the internal complexity of the GetSocial application (things like self encryption).

Do you get any useful revenue from the Google ads on getsociallive.com ?

As in the case of the donations, I was curious about AdSense. I know for a fact that I never click sponsored links myself, but I guess some other people do because Google makes a living out of it. I didn’t bother with A/B testing and other cash boosters, I just added a single ribbon of ads.

So far revenue has been disappointing (this is also the place to mention that the process of getting my AdSense account approved was very annoying and arbitrary, with zero support). There were some cases where I got more than 1 dollar per click, but I currently get more money through donations than through AdSense. Interestingly, the ratio of ad clicks per page view is similar to (though a bit lower than) the ratio of donations per download.

You can find out more about GetSocial here and GetSocialLive here. Hillel’s blog is here.