Just over two weeks ago Mozilla began accepting bitcoin donations. In the first three days our bitcoin donation form was live, we raised $1,600 USD in bitcoin, and to date we’ve raised about $5,000 USD. Here is the trendline:

We received numerous requests from donors that they wanted bitcoin featured right on our primary donation form. Given the volume of page views to that form (millions during the life of the campaign), I was concerned that adding any unnecessary text would distract donors and depress non-bitcoin conversions, the source of more than 99% of all our campaign revenue. So we decided to add “Donate with Bitcoin” text, and test whether it depressed conversion or not. Here is what that looked like:

The test showed that revenue per visitor drops by about $0.07 USD. Here is the Optimizely graph showing a 7.5% reduction in revenue per visitor:

Seven cents doesn’t sound like much. However, at scale, it adds up. Our donation form will get roughly two million more visitors before the campaign concludes on December 31st — which means adding “Donate with Bitcoin” would reduce income by about $140,000 — a significant amount.

At this time, bitcoin donations are not high enough to offset that lost revenue. We want to make sure bitcoin donors can find a link to give bitcoin, but this test suggests our primary donation form isn’t the optimum location.