Archive for July, 2007

Finalists for Most Helpful Thread

We’ve selected the finalists for the most useful thread in our Member Awards. These threads were all nominated by other RedFlagDeals.com members and they’re so great, I thought they deserved just a bit more attention:

Our Facebook Apps – Get your coupons through Facebook

We recently instituted a version of Google’s 20% time at Clear Sky Media and the first fruits of that policy are a number of Facebook Apps.

Our first app was our Canadian Coupons app powered by RedFlagDeals.com that you can try out here.  (Facebook account required of course)

We then released a Canadian Freebies app, again, powered by RedFlagDeals.com.  Click here to try it.

Then most recently we’ve released an American Online Coupons app that is powered by our new site, GetMyThrift.com.

We’ve wanted to move into the coupons space in the US for some time, but we wanted an interesting way to do it.  The Facebook app is an interesting backdoor.

Derek Szeto is a finalist for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year – Emerging Entrepreneur Award

It was announced today that ClearSky Media Founder, Derek Szeto is up for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year – Emerging Entrepreneur Award in the Ontario division!  Derek founded RedFlagDeals.com 6.5 years ago and has actually been up for a few awards over the years as a result.  Most notably he was a national finalist for the ACE Student Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004.  Derek has put a lot of hard work into RedFlagDeals.com and PriceCanada.com, so it’s great to see him get this recognition!

It’s Reader Appreciation month at RedFlagDeals.com

RedFlagDeals.com really is a community, so we decided to make July Reader Appreciation month. The big event during the month is our 1st Member Awards. Right now we’re in the nominations phase, so members are currently nominating each other for awards like Best Hot Deal Forum Poster, Best Freebie Forum Poster, and Most Helpful Member. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all pans out, but my hope is that it will highlight the members who go the extra mile to help out and inspire other members to get more involved.

Adsense for Charity: Why not?

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:

  1. Inside my Adsense account I select what charity I would like to donate my money to.
  2. 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.