Does it make sense to support the project through donations?

Question

Monetization

The fact is that to find a normal video hosting, where annoying ads are not shown, there is no special censorship, where the video is encoded in good quality, and at the same time it is practically not available not only on PC but also on smartphones. I have one now :)
Before that, I thought to provide money for services (traffic \ disk space to sell). The project has already existed for 5 months, but users are not very active. Maybe it makes sense to provide everything for free, but live on donations, like Wikipedia? What do you think ?

Answer 1

Look at your direct competitors (youtube/vimeo/vevo/rutube), they all live on advertising + paid goodies (VIP account, etc.), and all other similar services that you find will work according to similar schemes .
We can conclude that your competitive advantages - no advertising and no censorship, do not play a special role for end consumers (in the general mass).
On YouTube, by the way, you can find videos in 1080p, i.e. "normal hosting, where the video is encoded in normal quality" also fades against the background of competitors.
For such a service, donations are acceptable, but will never become the main means of monetization.

Answer 2

It should be noted that “living off donations” is not just putting up a donation button and passively waiting for receipts. This is also a big marketing to attract a large number of users, and promote the idea of ​​a gratuitous contribution among them.
Wikipedia has a huge advertising fundraising campaign every year, this campaign is carefully prepared, the results of past campaigns are analyzed, then the work is done to disseminate information about the campaign: naturally, large resources are spent on all this. And without such a campaign, it would hardly be possible to collect even a tenth of what they collect. In addition, it seems that about a third or half of all Wikipedia funds are provided not by individuals, but by various foundations.
At the end of 2012, we also tried to run a similar campaign at Darudar with the little funds we have. And in two months of fees, we managed to collect an amount twice the amount of annual fees that we have on the service in the background. But this required a fair amount of ingenuity and effort from us.
In general, according to our experience, gratuitous patronage of users is about 10% of income. The other 90% comes from the sale of contextual advertising. At one time, we also thought of completely switching to patronage support, but now the Freemium model looks more realistic when we provide additional paid services to users.
I can also recommend reading our article for inspiration.on the types and volumes of crowdfunding (public funding).

Answer 3

It is foolish to believe this: Russian people do not like to sacrifice.

Answer 4

It is not entirely clear what massive user problem your service solves. Indeed, for life on donations, mass character is needed, and the problems you have described are rather of a private nature.
Maybe I do not quite understand the scale of your "not very active" , but from my place it seems that much less will come out of the donation venture than from the pro-account venture.