Write a series of articles on how to make some money using GitHub Sponsors

[szabgab]

As I am trying to learn how to increase my income from GitHub sponsors I figured it would be a good idea to check what others, who have substantial income do. Write up my understanding and publish it somewhere. I felt that https://dev.to might be a better place to post these articles than my personal blog. They might be useful to some other people as well and might get more comments there.

Then I thought I could ping the people I mention in these articles so they can either comment on it, share it with their own audience or publish an analysis from their point of view. Given that all of these people have a GitHub account I figured the best might be to create an Issue on one of my projects and mention them in the issues. I hope this won't spam them.

A few things I am interested in:

• What kind of projects do these people work on?
• Do they have many small projects or a few big ones?
• Do they contribute to a lot of other projects?
• What do they put on their "GitHub Sponsors profile" page?
• What do they put on their "GitHub profile" page?
• What kind of tiers do they have?
• What do they promise in exchange of the sponsorship? Anything specific or just "work more on these projects"?
• What else did they do to promote the sponsorship program?
• How much money do they make per month?
• How much do they make per sponsor?
• Why do people sponsor them?
• Why do companies sponsor them?

---

• What else do I want to know?

[szabgab]

Opening article in the series: GitHub Sponsors - A series on giving an receiving 💰 mentioning articles of @azu

[szabgab]

The first person I covered is Oliver Blanthorn, the main developer of Tridactyl. @bovine3dom

[bovine3dom]

Hi, thanks for the ping :)

I'm travelling at the moment and won't be back for a few days. I'll try to respond more fully then.

But for now I'll say that the thing I have learnt is not to assume that everyone else has the same financial circumstances as me. Concretely, whatever amount you think is reasonable to donate to you per month, then multiply that by ten or even a hundred and you may find that people will think that is reasonable for them.

I can get you data on the distribution at some point (remind me if I forget and you care), but my gut feeling is that about half of my income comes from the top 10% of my donors.

[szabgab]

Today I wrote GitHub Sponsor Sindre Sorhus, author of awesome lists, npm packages, and iPhone Apps about @sindresorhus.

[szabgab]

Yesterday I published GitHub Sponsor Rust developer David Tolnay about @dtolnay but forgot to mention it here. So now I do.

[szabgab]

Today I published GitHub Sponsors: azu the Japanese TypeScript and JavaScript developer about @azu.

[szabgab]

Today I published GitHub Sponsors: Jon Schlinkert JavaScript developer about @jonschlinkert

[szabgab]

Today I published GitHub Sponsor the Servo Rust project! about @servo

[bovine3dom]

I finally got around to crunching the numbers and it's a very satisfying power law.

My hunch wasn't far off: the top 10% of my sponsors are responsible for half of my income. The bottom 50% of my sponsors are only responsible for 6% of my income.

Hope this is interesting to you. Let me know if you want me to do anything else with the data.