Below is a little banner ad that invites you to donate moola to this website. Every day or so lately, someone writes me and says, "I've never done this before…how much do I tip?" Obviously, that's an awkward question for me to answer. I've received amounts as high as $50 and as low as under a buck. To be quite candid — not just about this website but any to which you might want to extend a gratuity — the little $1 and $2 tips are kind of a waste, all around. Paypal takes, as their commission for processing the transaction, 30¢ on each payment plus 2.9%. This means that on a ten dollar transaction, they only get 60¢ but on a one dollar tip, PayPal takes a third. Amazon, which some folks use for this purpose, charges 15¢ plus 15%. This means that they get 30¢ on a dollar tip and $1.65 on a ten dollar tip.
The vast majority of the donations we receive here are $10 or $20, and those are the amounts I tip other sites. My feeling is that it's better to tip one site $20 than to tip twenty sites a buck apiece. The latter sends too much of the money to Paypal or Amazon instead of to the proprietor of the website you like. (In case anyone's interested, whatever you give to this site is either re-donated to other sites or, more often, spent on silly stuff I purchase on eBay.)