I agree with you and the comments here – there is nothing wrong with offering a way for readers to donate some cash in return for the free content they are consuming.

However, when people like John Chow start asking for donations in addition to the saturated advertising already present, and in addition to charging people $10 to have the ‘no follow’ attribute removed from their comments it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

- Martin Reed

But the plugin wouldn’t exist if people weren’t donating, so who am I to say readers shouldn’t be able to give money to their favorite bloggers? Even if I don’t quite understand it myself.

Is asking people to buy you a beer = cyber-begging?

Markus Allen ran an experiment some time back. He sold an ebook for I think $10 or so. But one day, he removed the payment button for that ebook.

Instead, he wrote that people can read the ebook for free now. And then pay whatever they felt the information was worth after they’ve read the ebook.

Many people didn’t pay him anything. But many others paid him $2-5-10-15-20. A few even paid him $100.

Yes when you read a person’s blog, he will be getting paid from ads. But if his post is really really helpful, this beer plugin will come in very handy. Because it allows his readers to show their appreciation and donating as much money as they think the information was worth.

Its not begging because the blogger is providing some value before anyone can donate money.

I’ve never donated to a blogger or website, just for articles. However, I’ve made a few small ($2-3) donations for WP plugins or other little bits of helpful code. The big reason I started doing that is that I’ve shared code with people via my blog, and a donation (however small) really helps justify the time required to program it.

I definitely don’t think a tip jar is begging. It’s more like the guy playing his guitar on the sidewalk. He’s doing something valuable, and a few people will toss some change in his hat.

Andrew