DoGood: Replace ads with "Good Ads" | Hacker News Reader

DoGood: Replace ads with "Good Ads"

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17 pointshailpixel20 comments

A couple notes on this horrible idea (yes I run a couple ad networks).

1) Giving up 50% of their revenue to charity isn't that impressive considering if they actually paid the publishers whose content they are running their ads on they would most likely be paying 50% or more. This is like if Robin Hood kept half of the stuff he stole, wouldn't seem so noble.

2) You are essentially opting in to see these ads. Sure you might be a good target market since you wanted to see the ads, but chances are it's going to be a small and quickly saturated audience. Advertisers will most likely see a quick drop-off in results.

A much more interesting implementation would be one that continues to show normal ads (through ad networks, etc) but takes the revenue from them and gives them to charity. You could even hijack affiliate links as well and donate that to charity. I always thought it would be super evil, but interesting, for someone like Bing to sell a toolbar that displayed their own PPC ads on Google's search results and paid some of it back to the user or charity.

Some version of this can still might happen if Microsoft would be seriously threatened by Google.

If Microsoft task would be to replace each google-ad with a much more useful ad(which they probably could, since google optimized for money per ad), they could offer much better ads.

If those ads could really help people , this could have a really strong PR for the common people. And maybe Microsoft could even wrap it in some ethical claim.

> Some version of this can still might happen if Microsoft would be seriously threatened by Google.

Hardly. I don't think Microsoft would want to play dirty with Google.

> since google optimized for money per ad

Google only gets paid if people will click on an ad. People will only click if an ad seems useful, so optimizing for money is optimizing for usefulness.

If you want the objective, not-for-money results, look in the big column on the left.

The Google optimization is more complex than utility. They optimize for clicks * revenue per click.

One example they don't optimize for - if there's a free way to achieve something , they don't show it to you.

Another - if the competition on a certain keyword is very high , you can get really high cost per click , which would push out good offers.

Another - if you can write great ad copy to lousy product.

Another - if a different way to display the products is more useful. that's the reasons google have different way of showing mortgage ads.

I think the ethics is questionable, because the average DoGood user is someone who'll actually click on ads (otherwise their business-model falls apart), which denies the site-owner revenue. It's basically zero-sum: the only money DoGood will make (for their benefactors), is money that a site-owner would otherwise have made (last I checked, most money were made from clicks, not impressions).

This was tried last year by Danish AidOnline, but after an intense PR fallout, they lost almost all of their advertisers and shut down.

The PR fallout was at least partly due to their 20% administration fee, which didn't fit well in their philanthropic guise.

the average DoGood user is someone who'll actually click on ads

I don't know if that's necessarily the case. I honestly can't think of a single banner ad that I've ever actually clicked and followed (though there have been some that I've noticed and kept in mind for later). I think that there is a large demographic out there, possibly including myself, who who be compelled to click on ads only because they realize that they are contributing towards something that they support. Personally, I don't particularly need help figuring out what to buy, but I wouldn't mind being better informed about causes I may be interested in.

This opinion, though, is not taking into account the business ethics of the service as a whole.

From http://www.dogoodhq.com/publishers:

"The DoGooder does not block ads from being served on websites. Consequently, any CPM revenue agreements you have with your ad network / servers remains unaffected- yes, you still get paid."

I wonder what that means; they don't get into the technical specifics, but I get the impression that they will simply download the ads, and replace the ads with DoGood ads as soon as they're downloaded. This might be even worse: it messes up statistics for advertisers, and in the end, it will cause your inventory's value to decrease, thus resulting in a lower CPM value. Additionally, it gives advertisers yet another reason to push for performance-based (CPC/CPA) campaigns, instead of the CPM-based campaigns used for premium content nowadays.

Yes, it seems like this will kill CTR, and distort CPM. Damaging to the publisher and damaging to the advertiser.

This makes it much worse than normal ad blocking, imo.

Activism and cause-fetishism is a good way to side-step people's critical faculties. If you couldn't get rational people to install your adware toolbar, reframe it: call it Green Advertising and drape it in some vague altruism, and viola.

It's a nice idea. Although I use ad blocking I have no fundamental objection to advertising online. What I do object to are ads which are annoying or offensive. If I could have greater control over what type of ads are displayed, so that they're always discreet and tasteful, I'd have no need to block them.

This brings an interesting twist to the question: "is blocking ads on a website denying the owner their revenue stream and therefore wrong in some way?"

Just thinking out loud, but the website owner could add a clause to its terms of service that explicitely forbid this - it could become a motive for account suspension.

How would they notice? And aren't we mostly talking about sites that don't have accounts to begin with?

It'd be sad to see it come to that. Additionally big sites have a high proportion of readers who are not registered with accounts.

How is this an interesting twist? As a website owner, it not just as bad -- it's worse, because it gives the user an additional incentive (beyond convenience) to block my ads, and feel self-righteous doing it.

Editorial ads :-)

Oh, absolutely! But that doesn't mean I want to see the Adsense/Casale revenue dry up at the hands of some opportunistic do-gooding scheme.

Well because I suspect a lot more people would consider this " wrong - which lends strength to the argument that ad blockers are sometimes unfair

Install my browser extension! Each page-load will save a patch of rainforest! :)

This is one other reason why we may move to paid content with no ads...

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