in it's simplest form an add network has 4 participants
* advertiser (the one who pays the bills, and wants to sell stuff to customer)
* add network (provides the infrastructure and the network of publishers, has bills to pay)
* publishers (which sell their screen real estate and want money from the add network in return)
* user (pot. customer, must click on the adds, valuable for the advertiser only if he buys something from him)
the thing is, the user is only valuable to the advertiser if he becomes a customer - if the user clicks just because he "wants to do some good" he is not as valuable as user who clicks because of "honest interrest" on the add.
so basically this systems needs to find publishers which want less money from their screen real estate because the advertisers will definitiv not be willing to pay as high prices for that "goody two shoes" traffic than they would for other "better qualified" traffic.
one more thing: i once worked with a startup which wanted to do the same thing with banner (and in-email) adds - and lets just say: i will never work in the charity vertical ever again.
I, for example, sometimes click on ads from companies I don't like, so that they have to pay for the click. Everytime I see an ad for Microsoft, Oracle or something along those lines I like to click on it to punish them a little for being stupid (in my opinion). I can't be the only one who does that?
I wonder why Anonymous hasn't picked that technique up as an alternative to DDoS. Maybe it's not effective enough, I'm not sure. But in the end I have better things to care about.
1) You're rewarding the advertiser by implying interest in what they have pitched, therefore encouraging them to blast you with more ads.
2) Assuming you're not using AdBlock, you've probably just added yourself to a much more targeted cookie pool of "people who are interested in Microsoft because they clicked". Enjoy the MS ads that will now follow you all over the web through one of the many behavioral retargeting networks.
3) You did nothing to hurt MS because they bought based on CPM so the impression was paid for in the first place, clicks don't hurt them.
4) You hurt the site you saw the ad on. Let's assume this site is a site you visit frequently. People click but no one buys, the ad agency compares the performance on this site vs. others with a less punishing audience, and decide that the money is better spent elsewhere thus depriving this site of much needed ad revenue.
Also many companies do place value on appearing socially responsible.
Few people click and it's mostly poor, uneducated customers. Your customers will be cheap-ass direct response marketers that can't compute a confidence interval.
Click-based attribution is fundamentally broken, and the market is moving away from that. Haven't you done any customer development with marketers!?
From an end users perspective, there won't be any difference to normal advertising. Unless they know that the money is being donated to charity it will make no difference to them.
I think the core of the idea is great and anything to help charity should be promoted as much as possible, but if you're not making anything from the ad impressions how do you plan to fund your infastructure, staff and other things you need to run successfully?
Down the line I envisage it growing to allow the user to direct the money from their impression + more..
Also, it will be run as either a non-for-profit or with a small profit from impressions (depending on what interests investors). We would still collect some percentage of impressions either way to pay for costs.
I'm launching a trial for my new startup called AdGives.
AdGives is online advertising mixed with social activism. Part of the profit from each ad click is donated to charities. The goal is to change the business model of online advertising so that the millions spent can be used to give back to useful real-world causes, while still achieving the advertising objectives of all parties involved.
'The AdGives Experiment' is a beta trial for AdGives. Please check it out. My aim is to get 7 advertisers, 7 publishers and 7 charities to take part over a week.
I'd love your feedback on the experiment landing page and AdGives in general.
I am the sole-founder currently self funding the project. I'm based in Melbourne Australia. I’m happy to answer any questions via email or twitter also. Details are on the site.
Thanks.
However I will be sending out a form to everyone who signs up to find out more about them. In the case of the publishing site it would be questions like how many visitors per day, content, etc.
For advertisers looking to generate clicks, they want qualified truly-interested people to click and go to their site and not clicks from people who are doing it for charity and have no interest in what in the advertiser's site/product. Most click based networks forbid incentivizing click actions that decrease click quality because it decreases audience quality.
Any time a person clicks on an ad for any reason other than they want to based on the content of the ad then they are worthless about 90% of the time. I know this because I've dealt with incent traffic for years upon years.
A charity based CPC ad is basically a fun idea at the start, but I'll do you one better: I'll donate a portion of my revenue from each lead you bring me to a charity.
One other thing..."Advertising sucks! Especially online. It's evil. It takes and takes, and never gives back. It's frustrating just thinking about it."
You just turned off pretty much any advertiser ever, including their agency and most publishers. You might want to tone down the evil talk just a tad... ;)
