Phil From Florida Asks About Charity Publishing

(written by Typist)

Hi all,

Brief intro, I’m a programmer, net biz veteran, long time Adsense publisher, but not an Adsense expert. I logged in to seek your advice about an Adsense related question.

I’m interested in how a publishing network might be used to raise money for charity. As example, imagine a free blog and forum hosting network that ran ads over content, with all proceeds going to a charity.

Adsense would seem to be a great way to monetize, except for a tricky problem which I’m sure you’ll see immediately.

While members of this forum would know not to click on their own Adsense ads, in order for a charity network to be successful it would have to scale up to include those that wouldn’t know this, and/or wouldn’t follow instructions. Some well meaning but uninformed members would merrily click away on the Adsense panels, thinking they were helping, leading to disaster.

At the moment I don’t see a way around this other than keeping the network small and limited to hand picked members, not a great scaling strategy.

If you agree, what alternatives to Adsense should I consider which don’t present this problem?

Thanks for any advice you may care to share, appreciate it.