To tip or not to tip?
Joshua Gans thinks that the problem with online ‘tip jars’ is not that people don’t want to make tips, but that the relative cost of giving a tip, in terms of time and effort, is too high compared to not giving a tip. He suggests making not tipping more costly by requiring people to enter their payment details whether or not they tip will result in more tipping overall. It does sound like a sensible strategy if your objective is to raise money from tips. If you just want to be popular, or get your revenue from advertising, then making not tipping more costly will just reduce overall demand for your content, which you probably don’t want to do.
However, if people are really willing to give tips when it isn’t too annoying to do so, why hasn’t a norm emerged of regularly clicking one of the ads on a blog, for example, to show appreciation for the content? Websites get paid per click, so clicking is effectively the same thing as giving a tip, with the bonus that it doesn’t cost the clicker anything except a little time; certainly no more time than it would take to fill in the payment details for a tip. Has such a norm emerged and I’m just out of the loop? Or are people really not that generous?
On a related note, I did some searching about online tip jars, and I came across tipjar.com. Check it out, it’s truly bizarre! Is it a joke?
3 Comments
I don’t think that, in people’s minds, there’s a connection between ad clicking and monetary reward for the author — certainly not people who don’t run a website. And, yes, being taken away from the website and having to visit a page you don’t want to see (the advertiser’s page), seems like a big psychological cost (even though it’s just a few seconds and a couple of clicks).
How about this idea: create an ad that says
“Tip the author with one click (no data entry needed).
By clicking here you’re tipping the author with $0.01.
Sponsored by Acme”
The ad takes you to advertising by Acme. It seems like both Acme and the author would have an interest in doing something like this, especially if the author posts good content (stuff that people wanna tip for) and Acme sells something that the website’s audience is interested in.
Maybe this wouldn’t work, what do you think?
Francisco: It sounds like a good idea. In fact I think I’ve seen that on some blogs, but I can’t remember where.
Even for regular ads, clicking to tip is pretty painless if you use the Firefox browser. You can just control-click the ad to open it in a new tab, and then close the tab without even viewing the advertiser’s website. So I don’t really understand why people don’t do it more often.
Free dial-up access providers required clicking on advertising. NetZero would show a pop-up every few minutes saying something like ‘Please support us by clicking on an ad’. The user can close the pop-up, but if no advertisement is clicked within a few minutes, the connection would be closed, and the user would have to dial again.