DoGooders DoEvil?
DoGood? Not so much.
DoGood Headquarters recently released a plugin for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari that replaces ads on websites with “green related initiatives, philanthropic calls for action and health and wellness ideas.” Before I get critical of this new service, because I will, I just want to say that I sympathize with part of what they are trying to do. Almost everyone has a favorite cause that they support and that they wish could raise more money. Doing something on the internet to help those causes raise more money or awareness is a good thing. There is no doubt about that. And it is done at the expense of advertising. Heck, most of us don’t enjoy advertising. So, what’s the problem, right?
The problem is that a lot of people enjoy consuming quality content on the internet. And most enjoy doing it for free. That is why most online content, if it makes any money at all, earns that money from advertising. That money is given in exchange for users viewing the advertisements and, in many cases, for clicking through on the advertisements. What the DoGooder plugin does is stop those ads from displaying to anyone that installs the plugin. Unless of course that person clicks the area of the site with the ads and indicates that they want to see the original ads. If someone installed the plugin in the first place, why would they ever do that?
Now, some people would say, “So what? What they’re doing is noble.” I disagree. DoGood says that they donate 50% of their profits to charity. That means that they’re profiting from showing ads displayed over other people’s sites. The rest of the money, including the other 50% of the profit and the other revenue goes to them. They don’t cut in the websites that are creating the content that they’re profiting off of. That leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. If services like the one DoGood Headquarters has created caught on, only pay per click ads would pay content providers. Then the money collected for advertising would drop for many sites as these DoGood style ad covering services impact their ability to provide quality content. Then sites will either close down or have to charge their audiences directly. That’s not what I want and that’s not what most other people want either. Bad form DoGooders, bad form.
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This is weak. Why not create a plugin that displays only ads for McDonalds or Target? What’s really bad about this is that the company behind it is making a profit while acting as if they’re a non-profit.