A New Non-profit Advertising Service Advertising Inventory As Fundraising Comodity For Charities NPO&

[Skepticus 0]

Hi folks.

I haven't been her for a long while. As it happens I never launched the businesses I intended to host when I first joined. For a number of reasons it had to be shelved. Recently however, I have been in the right place at the right time to make a couple of tenuous connections between the prevailing conditions and this has culminated in my current project, for which I would appreciate any advice I can muster and a since I am starting off without half a dime, it will require some creative financing and scalability to get from zero up to running speed. Remembering this community as a place to trade my mussing (or semi-coherent ramblings if you prefer) for good, no-nonsense web server space of industrial quality, I dug it out of my bookmark crypt. So here I am again.

My recent dabbling's have included a few ideas to raise funds for an existing non-profit organization and the business idea mentioned above was also intended to permanently serve part proceeds to a larger charitable cause. Meanwhile, I have grown increasingly despondent about the state of Internet advertising quality in terms of integrity and honest that is. The fact that advertising is inherently coercive is bad enough. We have to live with the intrusion of greed motivated self congratulation, and know (if we ever give it a thought) that it is driving up the price of all the goods and services we all pay for. Then along comes Mr Google to 'ad(d) sense'. Sense like the fact that for the 20th time this week, I have been the lucky 999,999th visitor to yet another website. What are the odds of this staggeringly implausible sequence of events? When it comes to willing endorsement of advertising for a particular delusional death cult, who market damaging pseudo-psychology to naive but innocent victims. I draw the line. Damn it all I actually see red. I consider Google to be nothing more than an evil greedy scourge. They are always tampering with their search algorithms to introduce deliberate bias and since they have acquired youtube the user has been neglected beyond belief.

I wouldn't start a new venture with the preordained agenda, of vengeance on a greedy corporate curmudgeon, but hey, if the shoe fits and there is a chance to even dent Googoliaths steely armor in the course of fair battle, then who am I to complain? The idea I have in mind is called Karmic Ads and the intention is to serve free advertising up for charitable institutions and NPO's. The unpaid ads would initially be circulated on the same sites, there would probably be a minimal exchange requirement; sort of you show me yours, I'll show you mine. I have a particular NPO which has a very large website presence, considering this proposal sometime this week. The overall participation of community based NPO and charitable organizations provide the exposure which can make it's way from there into the private sector. The NPO's are kept from publishing the commercial inventory though so there will be an imperative to keep the advertising/publishing balanced as far as possible. I have envisaged a network isolated from the others, so balancing the load will be a challenge.

It may be necessary to forgo the ambition of an independent network, at least until it's up and running. The reason for independence is because of I intend Karmic Ads, to include some code to make provisions for a rating system - a sort of karma. The end user (website visitor) can rate the ad, just as you can with youtube videos and a host of other web content. My thinking is that ads which are rated will not only provide selection parameters to regulate their value (and priority/frequency) with biasing factor, but the perceived quality of advertising should drive the value of the inventory up, but also the customers will also know that on the whole, the ads which are advertised by Karmic are far more likely to be advertised by reputable and respectable vendors. I am very new to the whole advertising on-line, so I may very well be misunderstanding a few things, but I did read a very informative article on Internet advertising

I have no desire to compete in a ruthless cut throat game. I have to question The imperative to cram as many banners on a page as possible regardless of content and at the risk of frustrating the visitor can only be mandated by reward motives, that deteriorate the overall value of the inventory. Paying for inventory which expires is a fools game. Page impressions and clicks are poor metaphors of a commodity. This makes the network desperate to off load inventory and use every available chance to make extra money out of each page loading or click-through. Of course that is going to drive agents to serve the publishers website as indiscriminately as they can and fill every opportunity to purposefully cram each of these events with a payable impression or click. In my scenario I would plan for managed redundancy and when page views occur that I don't have specific paid inventory to cover, then I could either A] Submit a community service ad to promote one of the relevant charity/NPO's or B] Rewarded the advertisers who have gained the highest ratings, with some extra bonus impressions.

I also hope (if permitted) to install some content management community/collaboration applications, perhaps a web-mail server and of course the ad server. The community wiki/forum etc, I hope will permit some proactive, organized interaction between the community and the organizations. Inter-organization cooperation, as well as public/community peer to peer cooperation. For instance a more deliberate organized product / service / business review forum, might be used to build on the theme of commercial feedback built into the advertising. This is essentially a form of peer review and critique. For the collaboration and community building aspect I found Collab I have also looked briefly a the OpenX server and played in the demo account. It does more than I could hope and even has a place to paste code to be run on the target client machine, so I hope that gives me the opening to patch the little rating tool into the frame. Naturally if you have any advice or tips regarding the best choice of software, I'm all ears. Any other ideas or feedback would be welcome and I hope to be testing a website soon.

Cheers Skepticus