Wouldn't it be great to use social media and online advertising to actually help people and do something positive?
Ripple has come up with a very smart way to do this:
ripple exists to harness the power of the internet advertising in the true spirit of the internet - providing a tool for people to help others. We are leveraging the market for internet advertising to generate revenue to help people rather than our pockets.
I want to look into this a bit more, am I missing something? It seems like an excellent idea.
Geekers - my thoughts exactly too!...Am I missing something?
Do good with a click.
p.s. really like the user interface - clean and simple.
Posted by: claire hyland | May 08, 2007 at 10:20 PM
...am I missing something here? I read and re-read the explanations on the ripple website but still couldn't figure out how it works.
click for what?
A.
Posted by: Asi | May 09, 2007 at 07:53 AM
Asi,
When you click one of the icons (water, food, education or money) you're served an ad. The advertiser pays ripple for that click, and 100% of the money that ripple collects goes to the charity designated to each respective group.
Pennies add up:
Over an indvidual's lifespan of fifty years (conservative estimate based on World Bank statistics) the average cost to provide water per day is per day $0.0016. For 1c (the lowest amount raised per click this equates to 6.8 days access to clean water and sanitation.
Hope it's legit, it's a great model.
Posted by: Dino | May 09, 2007 at 08:25 AM
it's indeed a great model but I doubt it will work. it feels a bit manipulative (only the manipulation is done by the good guys....)
i'm waiting for the times that google will contribute 0.003 of their adsense revenue.
A.
Posted by: Asi | May 10, 2007 at 04:31 AM
Asi, your cynicism comforts me :)
Posted by: Dino | May 10, 2007 at 06:19 PM
An update on Ripple: Unfortunately, Ripple does not earn any money from Google, nor do they currently donate any money per search.
This is from the Ripple blog - http://blog.ripple.org/ - June 11th, 2007
"Ripple Search has encountered a couple of issues and ads are no longer appearing on the Google search results page - unfortunately this means that ripple Search is not presently earning money for our charities."
Posted by: McC | June 25, 2007 at 11:03 PM
Here's the latest from the ripple blog - http://blog.ripple.org/
July 1st 2007
"Just a short post to confirm that ripple search is now fully functional again and each search generates revenue to help fight poverty!"
And 100% of ripple's revenue still goes to charitiy!
Posted by: Simon | July 03, 2007 at 09:33 AM
Awesome...go ripple.
Posted by: James | July 03, 2007 at 07:03 PM