My BitPass experience to date

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Tragic Lad
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Joined: Thu Jun 21, 2001 7:00 pm
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My BitPass experience to date

Post by Tragic Lad »

As one of the folks who's a BitPass earner, I just thought I'd share my own experience to date. I'm a virtually unknown comic artist with about a small, not widely promoted site. Traffic-wise, I'm lucky to see a couple dozen people through my site each day.

Setting it up -
The BitPass system is fairly easy to implement. I munged up a bit in my first attempt to get it going but that was more my own technical inexperience than anything. The BitPass support staff were right there to help me out (on a Saturday evening, no less) and everything has run fine since.

Donations -
One of the things I've definitely noticed is a jump in the number of people donating at my site. The tagline I've been using is 'be as generous as you want to be'. Even if you don't intend to sell content from your site, I think you'd be nuts not to take bitpass donations in addition to your paypal or amazon donations. I've had everything from a dollar to a penny find it's way into my tip jar. With the exception of the person who gave a dollar, I don't think any of these people would have given me a tip. The tips are smaller, but they are definitely more frequent.

Money money money -
Well, I'm definitely not rolling in it, but for a site that updates infrequently and has only a handful of visitors, I'm not doing too bad. To date BitPass payments and donations have been enough to cover my hosting fees. Sad thing is, that's still better, financially, than when I was self-publishing and distributing through the direct market.

Conclusions -
Two months of accepting payments online and I'd have to say that BitPass is a success. Like anything, you take away what you put in. For the minimal effort I've put in, I've broken even. Were I to apply myself and boost the frequency of updates, I'm sure I'd see a greater return.

As someone else on these boards posted, 10,000 transactions a month, at a quarter each, is enough to make this a full time gig. This isn't an impossible feat. This is do-able. imho, full time webcomic-ing is just as (if not more-so) a viable career path than work in the print comics industry.
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