Thanks to everyone who participated in my experiment by clicking the shiny green buttons. After stripping out search engine spiders and people who clicked multiple buttons, I received 154 “tips” over the 11 blog posts that I ran the experiment on. The total amount tipped was $38.21, or $3.47 per post. However, the posts were on the site for varying amounts of time, and older posts obviously tended to receive more tips. The median tips per day per post was 91 cents and the average was $1.08. Total tips per day were around $5. Over a year, that’s some nice beer money, and a lot more than I was making with Adsense.

The median across all tips was 10 cents, and the average was 25 cents (so the distribution is quite skewed). Here’s the distribution of all tips across the five amounts that were allowed:

Clearly more people tend to tip at the smaller amounts. However the spike at 25c is possibly interesting (or maybe just a statistical anomaly, I’m not sure). What is also interesting is that most of the revenues come from the bigger tips — demand seems to be quite price inelastic:

On a per-post basis, like I said above, the varying lengths of time makes comparisons across posts difficult. Comparing revenues per post per day shows a wide range, from 38 cents to $2.20:

Overall, I think it was an interesting experiment. I’ve now added TipJoy to all posts on my blog, so I’ll be seeing how actual tips compare to the data from this experiment. Very unfortunately, TipJoy doesn’t seem to work in RSS yet. So if you want to leave a tip, you’ll have to click back to the original blog post first.