Jason Kottke, who launched a drive for funds from “micropatrons” in February so he could blog full time, reveals today how the drive shook out.

Short version: he raised plenty of money (about 1/3rd of his former annual salary), but only 1/3rd of 1 percent of his average monthly visitors contributed, so he’s wondering if this is a sustainable model — since when he goes back to the well next year, lots of contributors from this year are bound not to come back (since the novelty will have worn off).

First observation: considering that he essentially only mentioned the drive once on the blog, and didn’t flack it to a mailing list at all, this is a great result.

I think he’s probably right to worry about the model’s sustainability, though. Right now the value proposition he’s offering his “micropatrons” is weak — basically “pay up or I’ll go away”. This is PBS style fundraising and even PBS doesn’t depend on that to keep the doors open.

What he needs to do over the next year is look to find ways to strengthen the community around kottke.org. People are much more likely to contribute to a site that they feel they have a stake in than one they don’t. Right now there isn’t much community at all around kottke.org — indeed, there isn’t even a comment facility, just TrackBack. That’s not to say that “comments == community”, but finding ways to involve people in the site is going to be crucial to keeping them as micropatrons.

For now, though, congratulations to Jason — I’m psyched to hear that he’ll be eating better than Ramen for the next year :-)