This article is about why musicians, comedians, jugglers, festivals and entertainers of all kinds are choosing busk.co to earn money live streaming. If you want to read more about the basics of live streaming, check out our simple live streaming walkthrough.

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In the last two months we’ve almost equalled the number of tips our site has processed in the previous 4 1/2 years. Why? Because buskers are making good money at the moment by live streaming their shows (on Twitch, Facebook Live etc) and linking to their profiles on busk.co.

A lot of you don’t know how busk.co works, so this article covers:

  • What your audience experiences (i.e. how they tip you)
  • How well buskers do on our site (and their privacy)
  • How you get paid
  • And what your audience will experience during the tipping process

But first of all, the process:

Process on how busk.co can help you earn money live streaming

Speed and choice on one platform

1. busk.co tips are really simple, and fast to give

One of the internet’s universal rules is that the longer a web page takes to load, the more clicks required by the user, and the more barriers in place, the fewer ‘conversions’ you’ll get. In other words, the harder it is to tip, the less able you will be to earn money live streaming.

This is where busk.co really shines. We’ve spent a lot of time making our tipping service as fast as humanly possible. We’ve minimised the number of clicks needed, the pages are lightning fast to load, and tippers don’t need to put in their email address before they can tip you (although they can choose to send you their email afterwards).

To tip you with Google Pay, for example, your audience will:

  1. Click “pay”
  2. Click “continue”

And that’s it. It literally is “tap, tap” and they’re done. If you don’t believe me, here’s a video of Google Pay in action, taking less than 15 seconds from page load to confirmation. We haven’t seen any other platform as fast as this:

2. Your tippers also have choices

If you connect your busk.co profile to both PayPal and your bank account, your audience can choose which method they want to tip you in. This is vital, because while some people prefer PayPal, other people don’t even have a PayPal account. Streamers are leaving a lot of money on the table by only offering their audiences one method to tip them.

So, if you’re thinking about using PayPal to earn money live streaming, you should keep in mind that tippers are choosing to tip with PayPal less than half the time on busk.co.

Your international audience can also choose what currency to tip you in, and change how much to tip. Here’s what that looks like for your tippers:

A very high tip average

I suppose the big question you’ll want to know the answer to is “how much are performers making on busk.co?”

Well, I couldn’t tell you how much any individual makes. We’re set up to hide that kind of information from ourselves. That’s none of our business, so we don’t look into your personal data.

However, we do look at ‘aggregated data’ (i.e. all tips lumped in together), and can tell you that the performers who get tips through us get surprisingly high tip amounts!

 

We analysed all the tips that went through our site this year, and I have to say we were quite shocked at the results! Tippers choose to tip pretty big amounts. In fact, there have been several tips in the region of $100-$200. Which is pretty cool. Especially when you consider that only 6.2% of all the tips processed on our site have been for under $5. Phenomenal stuff.

A very low fee

WE don’t charge anything. The Busking Project CIC doesn’t earn anything from your tips. We’re not doing this for the money.

However, Stripe and PayPal both have fees for transactions. The rate is variable depending on the amount you’re being tipped, but we estimate that the average commission is in the 3-4% range for both Stripe and PayPal.

You can see prices for the UK here:

stripe.com/gb/pricing

paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

Earn money live streaming…but also build a fan base

If you want to earn money live streaming, it’s not just enough to accept tips, you also have to grow an audience who like tipping you. So, we set up busk.co to give tippers the ability, after they’ve made the tip, to “stay in touch” with you by providing their email address. We didn’t think it would be that popular a feature, because it’s optional, it doesn’t come with rewards to the tipper, and it happens right at the end of the process.

And yet, 2/3 of the people who tip artists on our site opt to also leave an email address:

That means by switching to take payments on busk.co you could start building an email list of your most lucrative fans, the people who’ve already tipped you in the past. It’s a high-value list; previous tippers are exactly the people you’d want at your next stream.

So how do we compare with PayPal?

I could have chosen any of the big tipping services that entertainers are using to earn money live streaming, but PayPal’s the biggest, so here’s how we compare:

  • Our card payments are faster than PayPal by a long way.
  • They’re also slightly cheaper on card payments
  • We cater for a wider range of payments than PayPal (including Apple and Google Pay)
  • We also take PayPal tips (if the customer chooses)
  • We don’t analyse, sell or misuse your personal data
  • We’re not a billionaire-backed for-profit company!

Testimonial

I’ll leave you with a testimonial. We got this feedback from Lucas Laufen. You can check out his profile here. He’s been using busk.co to collect tips for over a month, sending his followers there from his live streams. He’s currently streaming a series called Let me Sing you to Sleep on Facebook Live.

I asked Lucas why he joined busk.co to take in tips, and this is what he told me:

“I started using busk.co because of a recommendation from a friend. It was important to me that I could give my audience options, not just PayPal. What if they don’t have a PayPal account? Also, that I could set up somewhere, get a link, and not have to keep going back, I could just get in and get out. It was super quick and easy to set up on busk.co.”