The other day I came across a really nice hurricane tracking site called Stormpulse. I used it to track Hurricane Hanna as she skimmed past the coast of Florida, and have been using it to keep an eye on Ike as well.



Today I was checking Ike’s progress through the Caribbean when I noticed something in the upper right corner of the site. The site was requesting tips. At first, I thought it was requesting feedback on ways to improve the site, but they were actually soliciting for currency. I found it to be a rather interesting (and direct) way to monetize a website.

It kind of reminded me of an article in which J.D. at Get Rich Slowly remarks that ads are NOT the new online tip jar. I agree wholeheartedly with what J.D. says, and tipjoy takes an interesting approach in providing web publishers with a tip jar. With tipjoy, users can directly tip web publishers instead of the roundabout (and detrimental) method of clicking ads. It is very quick and easy to leave tips with tipjoy and you can tip as little as 5 cents at a time. I took at look at the tipjoy stats for Stormpulse, and so far the site has earned nearly $4,800 in tips!

Not too shabby, considering that people generally aren’t very charitable. Although I hardly expect to ever get that kind of traffic, I thought I’d take a crack at adding tipjoy to my site as well. If you have a high-traffic website, you may want to try appealing to the better nature of some of your loyal visitors and see what happens when you ask for tips.