Tipjoy suggestion, not specifically RescueTime related:

Could you make it so that if you've tipped the blog/website over some threshold amount, the advertising on the site would disappear? Kind of like becoming a premium member?

It's an interesting idea, certainly.

Some have suggested it's a bad idea, that it would be better to just do what we do and let the dust settle on what kind of advertising people accept.

It would probably involve a deal with an ad provider, with some percentage being split between the site owner and the ad network owners.

It would also probably need to last for a little while, like an hour or a day.

The biggest problem is that it is competing with free. People that would use this would probably just use adBlock, no?

You don't need to involve ad providers. This is solely the decision of the site owner, who installs the topjoy widget. I don't remember where it was published, but there was evidence that regular visitors have near 0% CTR. Instead of relying on the $0 advertising revenue of your loyal readership, makes more sense to let them tip you and read your content. The added bonus of eliminating the advertising noise could increase tipping rate/amount. I'm not sure what else you have planned, but it may be good to focus on features that could increase tipping rate of loyal readerships.

Me for instance, I have ad blockers up, and I wouldn't mind tipping Economist or NYT $5/mo to avoid ads when I'm away from my home comp.

The NYT had to go free because it's gated content couldn't make enough money.

One might think this implies that there just aren't enough people like you that would support the site.

I think that could easily be an aberration in the distribution model. Easy voluntary payments are a middle way.

Involving an Ad group would make it easier to deploy, unless the Ad owners gave some backlash.

There was not enough incentive to pay for the gated content in NYT, and that gated content still had ads galore. Also, the monetization value of regular visitors that typically do not click on ads is near $0.

I think there may be some miscommunication.

Voluntary tipping improves the monetization of typically hard to monetize regular visitors. I'm suggesting that there are other things you can do to improve the tipping rate/amount from these regular visitors; one of them being to remove advertising from a site for a visitor when they tip past some threshold or something.

Yes, I think we're in agreement.

This is actually a really interesting experiment in monetization of free web applications.

I don't see the tipjoy button

update: I see, I have to login..

They have it most places, but not the landing page.

If anyone doesn't already have an account (and is on a Windows or OS X box), they should make one and start using RescueTime immediately. I use it religiously.

Does rescuetime show how much time you spend using rescuetime? Do you have to install it a second time to track that? ;)

Eight hours and three minutes (since november 07).

vs. 22 hours on news.yc and 313 on textmate.