I recently had an idea–let me know what you think of it.
What if website publishers agreed to donate their revenue from a single day’s worth of advertising to the charity of their choice?
Everybody from the new blogger who makes $0.65 per day to popular sites like Boing Boing or Gawker could participate. We’d pick a day (for example, June 17), and everybody would donate their ‘take’ from that day to whatever charity they liked.
There’d be a website (say, onedaystake.org) where, if they chose, they could report how much they were donating (depending, of course, on the terms of their advertising agreements) and the charity which they were supporting.
What do you think? Does such a thing already exist? Do you think people would be willing to donate 0.27% of their advertising revenue to charity?
UPDATE: As I think about this idea more, I don’t think I’d want to publish how much each site had donated. We’d collect that data to maintain a running total, but wouldn’t make it public on an individual basis.
UPDATE #2: One further question–how long should we make the gap between the initial announcement and website launch to the date earmarked for donations? Three weeks, maybe?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Great idea. I don’t have advertising on my own site just yet. But it’s a fabulous idea. Perhaps the collating site could allow people to publish which charities are being supported and by whom. It would be a way for other sites to glomb on to a charity and maximize the donation as well as allow readers to add to the kitty.
PS Not that it really matters to me, but why do you not allow trackbacks, yet? WordPress has the capacity, I believe.
Excellent idea! Let me know when you get this organized. Or, if I can help get it off the ground…
Love the idea… I’d rather have it be a set charity for each month (with next month’s getting “voted” up, and previous ‘winners’ not being allowed to ‘win’ again). Otherwise you’ll just get people doing 69c donations and such, whereas a cheque from the entire blogosphere for 25K would be much more fun.
Oh, and b5’d totally be in for this. We’d need to (internally) figure out what one day’s “take” is (since we have monthly and quarterly and yearly deals). But yeah, totally awesome idea 🙂
How would you do it without violating the TOS for various ad programs? If I disclose how much I make, I’ll violate the TOS and Google will kick my butt. You’d have to get them on side. I know you mentioned the conflict in your post, but I think it’s really important to find a way to work around that. Also, I have no idea if this is just paranoid, but would the various advertising providers think it was some sort of baiting if you ran a program like this? Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great idea.
Andrea: It is indeed an issue, though I’m not sure if it’s one for Google Adsense. Their disclosure rules changed last year. It’s a little unclear to me whether or not you can disclose the amount of a single day’s earnings.
I see a bigger issue in people falsely reporting to the site regarding what they donated. I can’t see an easy way around that, unless the site becomes the middleman and accepts donations. As I see it, there are basically two models:
1. People make donations elsewhere, then come to onedaystake.org and submit the amount they donated.
2. Onedaystake.org becomes a clearing house, enabling people to donate directly, and then splitting the donation amongst a bunch of charities.
Option #1 is more work for the user, but more in line with my original idea (basically, “give money to charity, I don’t care which one”). Option #2 is less flexible, and more work for the site operators (i.e. me), but would ensure accurate reporting.
I’m kicking it around.
Jeremy and I talked offline, so I just wanted to say thanks for the vote of confidence.
Matt: Thanks for the suggestions. As for trackbacks, I stopped permitting them because of trackback spam. I may turn them on again, but I’m not a particularly strong believer in the technology–I don’t think we’ve got it right quite yet.
If you went with 2, you’d get stuck with a ton of fees, although maybe you have some solution left over from the flowers project.
With 1, you have a moral hazard, as you know.
I’m sure there’s some solution out there. Maybe AskMefi or Slashdot.
It would be good to look at recent data to see the high traffic days for most sites. As I recall–however, I can no longer find the source–blog traffic dips lower on the weekends. If the idea is to donate it would be more generous to have it on a weekday instead of weekend.
You could also offer folks with sites who will be contributing to donate what they think their one day take is, or another amount, which could be higher. Just collect those donations at the site onedaystake.org and link back to the folks who’ve donated.