HOW IT WORKS
At the heart of DonateOpen is a social invention — our know-how:
DONATION SERVICE + DONATION-RANKINGS
We combined a donation service with the ranking of content and its creators, turning a private “thank you” into a visible result. The key is the public visibility of donations.
Thanks to it, people donate more often and more generously than when they don’t see the results of their efforts, don’t know who donates, for what, and how much, or who else is worth donating to. This makes donating feel incomplete, unreciprocated, and demotivates, becoming a barrier to entry for those who would donate if it were more engaging and attractive.
We are solving this very problem — making it pleasant to donate, so people get pleasure from making donations, see the benefit for themselves and others, and receive recognition.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS FAIR
Our rankings launch a public tournament of status and reputation — the most honest, noble, and highest type of social game imaginable.
Imagine that someone who resonates with you, is close to you in some way, who inspired you, who gave you fulfilling minutes and hours, is participating in this “game”, and you have the power to support them with a donation. In such conditions, people donate competitively and involve their social circles in the process.
Our rankings create an Achievements Fair — a new kind of Vanity Fair where mastery and quality convert into status and income. With them, we launch the flywheel:
DONATIONS DRIVE RATINGS. RATINGS ATTRACT DONATIONS.
PAGERANK FOR PEOPLE
Our ratings are based on a technological innovation — we have built a PageRank for people, implementing a pioneering approach to ranking: a product (content, service, producer, etc.) is of higher quality the more donations it has received, and — attention! — the higher the reputation of the donators.
Unlike in popularity ratings, where one person = one vote, here the weight of a donation depends on the donator’s reputation (this is the same fundamental idea that Google is based on, which we have transferred from web pages to people). The result is a new generation of ratings:
RANKINGS OF QUALITY, NOT POPULARITY
In addition to reputation, we account for:
- Engagement, activity, and immersion in the subject, field, or genre
- Taste and qualification, determined by the level of content consumed
And our recommendation system, working in tandem with the ratings, selects content for users that is highly likely to generate a “wow effect”, and this “wow” will be embodied in donations.
Ratings and recommendations are the two supporting “wings” of content navigation. Ratings identify hierarchies of quality, recommendations show what is right for a specific person.
WHAT IS OUR DIFFERENCE?
Some might say: “There’s Patreon, there are donation services in streams. Why another one?” Existing donation services capture less than 5% of the market’s capacity, which has a potential of over $100 billion per year. According to Goldman Sachs, the “creator economy” market (including subscriptions and other monetization models) will grow from $250 billion (2023) to $480 billion by 2027. Today, 400M+ people make donations, 100M+ people receive donations, and over 20M of them live on donations alone.
However, they monetize the audience that the author brought from elsewhere. (If you don’t bring your own audience, you won’t earn anything. That’s why today, only 3% of registered authors earn from donations, the rest make do with encouragement from their own mom’s friends or aren’t on donation services at all. This means the donation industry is far from fulfilling its purpose “to make it so that artists do not starve”)
THE FIRST: DONATEOPEN IS MORE THAN A “WALLET”...
...we are an interactive showcase for authors. Our service brings a new audience to authors. This is important for donators, for established authors, and for new authors, and it is achieved in two ways:
- When people look at the donation ratings of their favorites, they see the ratings of those ranked higher and lower, as well as those at the Top.
- We recommend content from various authors that evokes a “wow effect” and the desire to donate.
Second.
We are the first in the world to introduce negative donations, so people can express their outrage and clear out content-trash.
Third.
We operate where there are few or no donations—written texts, blogging, podcasts, online education, language courses, and a dozen other fields. Thus, we are creating a market ten times larger than what currently exists.
Fourth.
With us, you can donate for individual works. Everything non-serial and niche gravitates toward monetization through single donations. There is more money in these single donations than in advertising — we are talking about hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars per year, and tens and hundreds of millions of people.
Fifth.
We show the community of donators around an author, creating social dynamics and motivation.
Sixth.
Donations are your verified digital profiles, they can be displayed anywhere on the internet where you want to be “verified”.
Seventh.
We offer a personal dashboard + donation-tracking of cultural consumption. This way, donations become milestones of your memory, the building blocks of your self-reputation, and you become a collector of donations.
Eighth.
Our commissions are three times lower than on services where donators “have no desire to donate, knowing that a third of their generosity, or even half, will go to the wrong place”.
FOR WHOM AND FOR WHAT?
Creators
Get discoverability, a new audience, a new Income and reputation capital.
Donators
Level up the creator’s ranking and raise their own status. Every donation you make levels up the creator’s ranking — and yours, so that here you see the ripple effect of your efforts — this is key to donating with pleasure.
Influencers
You will become the official curator of your category, gathering the best creators, and their fans will follow. We will provide the technology for matching and community growth.
Partners
We provide access to real-world data: a new microscope for the social sciences.
The first 1%
Join as a founder of the Open Donations movement and unlock your privileges.
Academics, researchers, and intellectuals
We provide access to real-world data: a new microscope for the social sciences. We invite you to the frontier of the social sciences and data science.
WE ARE BUILDING AN ECONOMY OF RECIPROCITY, MAKING DONATIONS FASHIONABLE
Join the DonateOpen movement so that bad content doesn’t suppress good content, and mastery is rewarded on merit
Register