Potential idea for internet fundraising
Hi everyone. I had an idea a few weeks ago for a possible small source of fundraising, but after a lot of research and mulling it over for a while I don't think I have the capacity at the moment to organise it myself, so I'm letting it go in the hopes that someone else could take it up. I'd like to assist, I just don't think I can spearhead the project...
A few years back, there was an LJ user who was using Megaupload's rewards program to pay medical bills. The idea was that if a user could get a million hits on their files, Megaupload would pay the user $10,000 (it has since been changed to 5 million hits). This works because sites like Megaupload make much more revenue from the ads on their download page than they give away. The campaign was to get as many people as possible to download a small file, up to once per day if possible, and thus claim the reward.
Now, the problem with that is that premium accounts on Megaupload are expensive, and they've upped the number of downloads you need to get. However, a large amount of imitators have surfaced, making up for their lack of brand recognition with better rewards programs and free registration. One of the terms is usually that the files downloaded exceed 1MB in size. In the course of my research I've found a lot of claims that people do this for income- (illegally) pirating the latest episode of a TV show or a video game, uploading it and spreading the link, and reaping the profit from hundreds of thousands of downloads of each episode.
My proposal is this: Someone with artistic talent designs a Japan themed wallpaper (or wallpaper pack for multiple devices, or app, or something) exceeding 1MB in size, and we start a LJ/facebook/twitter campaign to get as many downloads as possible. The standard reward seems to vary between $1-4 per 1000 downloads, meaning achieving 1,000,000 downloads would yield a $1000-4000 donation to a charity helping in Japan. Sure, it's not huge, but it comes at zero cost to the people helping. Slacktivism at its finest! :P
Potential websites to use include:
uploading.com
hotfile.com
These ones seem to be fairly widespread and long lived, with a decent rewards. There are potentially a million to choose from.
Anyway, this post is getting a bit long, so I'll check to see if anyone is interested before I go into too much detail. Thanks for reading!
[MODs - not sure how to tag this, sorry.]
A few years back, there was an LJ user who was using Megaupload's rewards program to pay medical bills. The idea was that if a user could get a million hits on their files, Megaupload would pay the user $10,000 (it has since been changed to 5 million hits). This works because sites like Megaupload make much more revenue from the ads on their download page than they give away. The campaign was to get as many people as possible to download a small file, up to once per day if possible, and thus claim the reward.
Now, the problem with that is that premium accounts on Megaupload are expensive, and they've upped the number of downloads you need to get. However, a large amount of imitators have surfaced, making up for their lack of brand recognition with better rewards programs and free registration. One of the terms is usually that the files downloaded exceed 1MB in size. In the course of my research I've found a lot of claims that people do this for income- (illegally) pirating the latest episode of a TV show or a video game, uploading it and spreading the link, and reaping the profit from hundreds of thousands of downloads of each episode.
My proposal is this: Someone with artistic talent designs a Japan themed wallpaper (or wallpaper pack for multiple devices, or app, or something) exceeding 1MB in size, and we start a LJ/facebook/twitter campaign to get as many downloads as possible. The standard reward seems to vary between $1-4 per 1000 downloads, meaning achieving 1,000,000 downloads would yield a $1000-4000 donation to a charity helping in Japan. Sure, it's not huge, but it comes at zero cost to the people helping. Slacktivism at its finest! :P
Potential websites to use include:
uploading.com
hotfile.com
These ones seem to be fairly widespread and long lived, with a decent rewards. There are potentially a million to choose from.
Anyway, this post is getting a bit long, so I'll check to see if anyone is interested before I go into too much detail. Thanks for reading!
[MODs - not sure how to tag this, sorry.]