A couple notes on this horrible idea (yes I run a couple ad networks).<p>1) Giving up 50% of their revenue to charity isn't that impressive considering if they actually paid the publishers whose content they are running their ads on they would most likely be paying 50% or more. This is like if Robin Hood kept half of the stuff he stole, wouldn't seem so noble.<p>2) You are essentially opting in to see these ads. Sure you might be a good target market since you wanted to see the ads, but chances are it's going to be a small and quickly saturated audience. Advertisers will most likely see a quick drop-off in results.<p>A much more interesting implementation would be one that continues to show normal ads (through ad networks, etc) but takes the revenue from them and gives them to charity. You could even hijack affiliate links as well and donate that to charity. I always thought it would be super evil, but interesting, for someone like Bing to sell a toolbar that displayed their own PPC ads on Google's search results and paid some of it back to the user or charity.
I think the ethics is questionable, because the average DoGood user is someone who'll actually click on ads (otherwise their business-model falls apart), which denies the site-owner revenue. It's basically zero-sum: the only money DoGood will make (for their benefactors), is money that a site-owner would otherwise have made (last I checked, most money were made from clicks, not impressions).<p>This was tried last year by Danish AidOnline, but after an intense PR fallout, they lost almost all of their advertisers and shut down.<p>The PR fallout was at least partly due to their 20% administration fee, which didn't fit well in their philanthropic guise.
From <a href="http://www.dogoodhq.com/publishers" rel="nofollow">http://www.dogoodhq.com/publishers</a>:<p>"The DoGooder does not block ads from being served on websites. Consequently, any CPM revenue agreements you have with your ad network / servers remains unaffected- yes, you still get paid."<p>I wonder what that means; they don't get into the technical specifics, but I get the impression that they will simply download the ads, and replace the ads with DoGood ads as soon as they're downloaded. This might be even worse: it messes up statistics for advertisers, and in the end, it will cause your inventory's value to decrease, thus resulting in a lower CPM value. Additionally, it gives advertisers yet another reason to push for performance-based (CPC/CPA) campaigns, instead of the CPM-based campaigns used for premium content nowadays.
Activism and cause-fetishism is a good way to side-step people's critical faculties. If you couldn't get rational people to install your adware toolbar, reframe it: call it Green Advertising and drape it in some vague altruism, and viola.
It's a nice idea. Although I use ad blocking I have no fundamental objection to advertising online. What I do object to are ads which are annoying or offensive. If I could have greater control over what type of ads are displayed, so that they're always discreet and tasteful, I'd have no need to block them.
This brings an interesting twist to the question: "is blocking ads on a website denying the owner their revenue stream and therefore wrong in some way?"