This has been on my mind for a little while now: why doesn’t Google add an automated way to donate Adsense earnings to charity?
Granted, Google has been busy with amazing innovations like rounded corners on ad units, but when most people don’t make enough from Adsense on a monthly basis to pay for a cup of coffee, doesn’t it make sense to give publishers the option of pooling their money to do something good? Rumour has it you can feed a child for less than the price of a cup of coffee per day…
I don’t have Adsense or any other ads on this blog. One of the primary reasons is that I don’t get enough traffic to make any sort of significant amount of money. However, there are millions of sites like this one (in terms of traffic) and if the few dollars per year that each of these sites would bring in were pooled together, a signicant amount of money would be raised that could be put to good use.
It doesn’t have to be a complicated implementation. Here’s how it could work:
- Inside my Adsense account I select what charity I would like to donate my money to.
- When my account reaches a certain threshold, the money is donated to the charity I chose and I am mailed a tax reciept. If I don’t reach that threshold within a year, I’m given the option of pooling my money with other people who chose the same charity, I don’t however get a tax receipt.
The result? Deserving charities have a new source of funds, I feel good about what I’ve done, and Google enhances their image and maybe attracts a few more publishers.
The one potential problem is well intentioned click fraud, however, Google already has bots that scan webpages for “please click my ads” and as long as they continue to enforce the existing rules, there shouldn’t be any significant problems.
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