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Ripple.org diverts advertising dollars to charities. All you have to do is click. Can it really be that easy?
We’re confident that social entrepreneurs and for-benefit companies will lead the way in addressing issues from poverty and human rights to climate change and corporate malfeasance. This space is particularly hot in the online world, and we’ve seen a number of exciting companies with truly innovative plans. There are also some misguided efforts. Today, we’re exploring Ripple.org, an Australian-based company with a simple click-and-search model that funnels ad revenue to a number of nonprofits in the fight against poverty.
The site provides two ways to essentially make charitable donations without coming out of pocket. First, you can click one of four links from the homepage. These correspond with the following roughly quantified benefits:
- Water: Give 6 days of access to clean water
- Food: Help a village feed itself
- Education: Give 2 days access to education
- Money: Finance a $100 loan for a day
With each of these clicks, you see an advertisement with a friendly “Please consider this message from our sponsors. By supporting Ripple they too are supporting the ripple cause.” Or you can use Ripple’s Google-supported search box from the homepage, which is sponsored. But you have to return to the homepage for each subsequent search in order for the sponsor to pay.
The company maintains that 100% of the ad dollars from these activities are sent to the charities. They also accept sponsorships to support the company, though none are evident. And despite its dot-org domain, it does not appear to be a nonprofit entity itself. This should be made clear one way or another, and it’s not.
The charities Ripple supports all look like excellent organizations, and the company’s mission is praiseworthy. Unfortunately, the model is fundamentally flawed in several ways.
The business premise is that a lot of money is generated through online advertising, so why not divert some of that to charity?
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.
The problem is that online advertising revenue is generated through some type of value proposition for both the user and advertiser. It’s about making that connection. Ripple provides no value to the user other than a quick feel-good from sending a couple pennies to a charity. This just isn’t sustainable. It also provides little or no value to the advertisers because the users and ads are random. The Net is all about targeting and performance as an advertising medium. If the ads were for nonprofits, then they might have something because those are the types of people who will come to Ripple.org. Even then, they’d need to harvest some user data to be sure. But nonprofit advertisers wouldn’t make a lot of sense (or cents). Otherwise, there’s no way to know whether an ad will have any relevance to the user and vice versa.
The sponsored search function, as we’ll visit in a future post on this topic, is also without any added value. It amounts to an inconvenience for the user and provides little or no value to the sponsor, since the only reason anyone would visit Ripple.org use it’s search box is to send those pennies to a charity. Also not sustainable.
There are many ways to affect change through social media and integrate socially beneficial activities into our everyday online use, whether it’s through shopping, social networking, reading the news, or search. We’re afraid Ripple isn’t one of them. That said, it could add value to the model in many ways and salvage what is otherwise a laudable undertaking.
One final note. We suggest a moratorium on any tagline that “saves the world one thing at a time”. Anyone who’s already using it, fine. Otherwise, we’ve reached the limit.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Matt // Jun 9, 2008 at 5:27 am
Hi Max,
Thanks for your review.
A few thoughts on your criticisms.
1. We are a non-profit. We are run by volunteers and all site costs are paid out of our pocket or by other kindly strangers.
Our FAQ is quite clear on how much of the money raised is donated…
“100%. Every cent. Full stop. Our donations are all authenticated by the charities”
2. Value proposition for the user
You are concerned that the ‘feel good’ from knowing that you are earning money for charity by clicking is not sufficient to attract people.
We have had over 350,000 unique visitors since launching our site. Over 7000 people visit our site everyday to click on one of our give buttons. Our traffic continues to grow.
Your assessment of the value of that ‘feel good’ to people is clearly flawed.
3. Value proposition to advertiser
We actually provide extraordinarily good quality advertising to advertisers. Our visitor is totally engaged in the ads as they are at the centre of their user experience. We see click through rates which are at 6-7 times the average industry rate.
4. ‘Save the world one *blank* at a time’
Ha ha….fair point. You got us there…since we chose that tagline it seems to be turning up everywhere! Maybe we’ll come up with something better in the future….
Speaking of the future we will soon be launching ripple 2.0 which will have a range of more interactive and community driven features. They may help address some of your concerns. Check back in a few months!
Good luck with your blog, it looks great.
2 Max Gladwell // Jun 9, 2008 at 8:26 am
Matt: Thanks for taking the time to clear up a few misconceptions. We’d recommend that “Ripple.org is a nonprofit organization…” appear in the first couple lines of the “About” section. This wasn’t clear to us, and donating 100% of the ad revenue doesn’t mean you’re a registered nonprofit organization.
That said, we’re still not a fan of any model that has a high potential for gaming the system. I could click each of the four buttons every day and see the same ad. What benefit does that have for the advertiser?
There’s also no way of telling whether that ad will have any relevance for me, so clicking a button once might be worthless to the advertiser. If you could get people to sign up and volunteer some data about themselves, you’d at least solve that problem.
We’ll check back with Ripple 2.0 and give it a look. Thanks again.
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