Adsense for Charity (English version of Frankwatching article)

Frank Janssen of Frankwatching.com gave me the opportunity to pitch my idea for Google Adsense for Charity at his site. I hope his readers will help me generate more attention for this idea and come up with ideas to get this idea higher up Google’s to-do-list. As said in previous posts, the origins of this idea lie in me looking at the enormous amount of $8 on my Adsense account and wondering if there was something better to do with it, instead of waiting 8 years for the first check. I have also found out that the idea is not unique. Two weeks before I blogged about it, Michael Yarmolinsky of Crohnsforum.com alsoasked Google for this possibility. Google’s first reaction to me has been that they will have a look at it.

The idea
It would be great if it would be possible to select in Google Adsense that (part of) the revenue will be sent to charity. This way it will become easy to contribute to open source projects or other good causes. This will increase the income of those charities. It will also become possible for accounts that generate little revenue to send the money that is there to a charity. (And yeah, Microsoft and Yahoo can also implement this idea, but unfortunately for them most of the money is at Google at this moment)

Possible ways to implement the idea.
- Account-owners can specify that all the revenues of their Adsense-account will be sent to one (or more) charities. At the end of each month the revenues of the account will be transferred to the charity, regardless of whether they have reached the limit of $100.

-Account-owners can specify that x% of their revenue will be sent to charity. At the end of each month this percentage will be sent to charity.

-Account-owners can sent a fixed amount per month to a charity, if this amount is generated by the account. The remainder is sent to the account-owner (if it’s over $100)

What charities?

I personally don’t care. They may be American, medical, Unicef, Open Source, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just as long as they do good. But Google probably will opt for a practical solution.

Advantages for the account-owner

The advantages for account-owners are in ease and simplicity. If an account-owner would have to do everything himself, he/she would first have to cash the check and then transfer the money (internationally). That’s a lot of work for small amounts of money. It also gives the account-owner a good feeling, that the money that used to be locked in into a small revenue generating account is put to good use.

Advantages for Google

Google will be able to improve on it’s “don’t be evil”-image. It will help charities (maybe open source projects. Google will profit from this in good PR and maybe better open source software. It will also keep away discussions about small amounts of Adsense income that are locked into an account. Another advantage is that it will make Adsense more attractive for a larger group of websites, which in turn will improve the reach of Adense and it’s attractiveness to advertisers. Keeping score of payments to charities online will only help here. There might be a small issue with Google loosing some interest on the money, but this is probably small compared to the goodwill. There are hardly any costs for executing this idea. Google will only have to screen charities.

How much money are we talking about?

Google had $10 billion in revenue this year. Almost all revenue is generated by advertisements. Google pays out about 40%. That is $4 billion. I assume that this idea is a long tail idea and it’s aimed at the end of the tail. The end of the tail is the last 0.5% of the revenue or $20 million a year. 99.5% gets paid to people that have an Adsense-account. But even if it was only 0.1% or less, it’s still an interesting amount of money.

Status

Google has replied to my suggestion, that they will look into it. This is great, but I would prefer hearing that they will implement it. The sooner, the more money there is for charity.

What can readers do?

Spread the word! Blog about it! Send it on to a Google manager you know! And help me find better ways to get attention to this idea. All your comments and ideas are welcome.

Reaction from Google to the charity suggestion

Well, Stephanie from the Adsense team replied to my idea and she forwarded it on. Let's hope we'll get a feature allowing to donate (a part of) the earnings of a page to charity (or open source). I'm still thinking about new ways how this could work out, like being able to donate part of the money to open source projects as a thank you for the tools. By enabling people to donate directly without them having to do anything for it, it is more likely that more people will donate (part) of their earnings with Adsense to some worthy cause.

Google's e-mail:
Hi,

Thanks for your thoughts on enabling publishers to donate AdSense earnings
to charity. I'm happy to pass along your comments to our engineering and
product teams.

Suggestions and ideas like yours directly contribute to making AdSense
better, and we appreciate your perspective. Please also feel free to
submit any future suggestions through our online form:
http://www.google.com/adsense_features_email.

Sincerely,

Stephanie
The Google AdSense Team

World Health Statistics, but cool!

Frankwatching pointed me to this great presentation at this years Ted conference by professor Hans Rosling of the Karolinska instute in Sweden. He gives a great talk on the misinterpretation of the third world, but the best thing is: He has cool graphics. He for instance shows how internet disseminated in the world, through letting balloons go up on a scale and you can see the great differences. Have a look at his presentation here, or play with the data online at Google.

http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling
http://tools.google.com/gapminder
http://www.gapminder.org/Projects/FlowerPower/FlowerPowerPoint.ppt
He also has an organisation around it: http://www.gapminder.org
This is also very much a pointer, why governments should open up statistical data.