And then there’s the oldest method in the book: setting out a tip jar and hoping your readers love your comic enough to donate the cash to sustain you. The difficulty with a donation jar is that the donor doesn’t really get anything out of it. Sure, fans like to support you, but at least with merchandise and print sales, they benefit from the transaction. Donations can be hard to extract save from the most hardcore of fans.
One way to make it work would be to run an annual or semi-annual donation drive. You let your readers know that it costs money to draw, ink, and host your comics on the web. It takes away from your time that you could otherwise be spending at a “real job” so to speak. If you build a case, readers will sympathize. If you build it badly, though, you could come off as needy or desperate, which could drive away readers.
