Reddit today announced plans to donate 10 percent of its advertising revenue receipts in 2014 to 10 non-profits chosen by its own community. The company says no ad revenue will go excluded: everything from a $5 sponsored headline to a large ad campaign will be added together before one tenth is donated.
Reddit will ask its users to nominate non-profits at the end of the year and will then hold an election based off of eligible nominees. Funds will be distributed proportionally based on the percentage of votes given to the top 10 non-profits.
There is one important detail worth noting though: if the voting system is tampered with, Reddit reserves the right to choose the non-profits. Reddit may act as a democracy most of the time, but it’s still a business at the end of the day.
“Ultimately, it will be up to all of you what happens – if things go well, the community will be responsible for disbursing a very real amount of money to a set of causes of your choice,” Reddit CEO Yishan Wong said. “If it doesn’t go well – then we’ll simply just pick by ourselves.”
Wong made a point to emphasize that “this isn’t a game,” that this is “real money going to real causes doing real things in the world,” and urged Reddit users to “put aside the game-playing and be serious.” Reddit says it will fight rigging with its usual “anti-vote-manipulation” code, non-profit nominees will be limited to verified 501(c)(3) organizations, and poor suggestions will be filtered out.
Reddit has had financial issues trying to keep the site afloat as its userbase has exploded over recent years. In October, the Reddit community made an effort to raise money for the site via donations, and it looks like Reddit now wants to give back.
See also – Reddit’s 2013 stats: 56 billion page views, 731 million unique visitors, and over 40 million posts and Reddit offers free ads of 100,000 impressions each to the first 250 ‘deserving’ crowdsourcing projects
Top Image Credit: Eastop
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