DoGood — How They Abuse Good Cause to Make Money

I just came across this website, DoGood, which provides a browser plugin called DoGooder that swaps website publishers’ banner ads with DoGood’s banner ads. Their rationale is that the banners they serve are all Green-related or philanthropic. I just published an article about documentary filmmakers who exploit good causes to promote their own careers. This is another example of how people exploit their association with good causes. The trick is to use the cause as a disguise so that the audience does not notice the exploitation.

What they are doing is stealing. They are stealing the contents (intellectual properties) that the advertisers paid for. Whether the advertisers are “good” or evil (or “generic”) is besides the point. Even if the products that they are selling are not “good” or “philanthropic”, these advertisers have the right to make their own decisions about the good causes they may want to contribute from their profit (or not). Advertising is a way for them to increase that profit.

DoGood accepts website publishers’ requests to be on their exemption list if they too serve Green-related banners. This would basically mean that most major publishers like New York Times would be exempted from it, which in turn means that DoGood will be stealing mostly from the little guys who barely make money from their websites.

On their website, DoGood assures publishers that they will still get paid for their ads, presumably because the plugin will still act as though it is requesting the real ads from the ad servers. But if the ads are not displayed, nobody will ever click on them. For the publishers, these clicks are the real sources of their income.

If DoGood was a plug-in written by some college student who makes no money from it, I wouldn’t have any problem with it, but DoGood is a private business. Even though they claim to donate 50% of the profit, they are still pocketing the other 50%. Even if DoGood was a non-profit organization, they would still be paying salaries to themselves. There are plenty of web-based projects where unpaid volunteers pitch in their time to keep them going. That would be an acceptable solution too. But DoGood is a business. Let’s not get fooled.

Any money that DoGood receives from their advertisers (not just their profit, I mean any money they receive) equates to the value of the goods (banner impressions) that the advertisers were supposed to receive for the money they paid, but were stolen by DoGood. And, also the clicks the publishers lost. Remember: DoGood does not provide any content. There is nobody working hard at DoGood writing articles, creating artworks, or shooting photographs. So, they have zero cost for generating contents.

It’s like the music sharing programs. There is a big ethical difference between those that make no money and those that do. I have no interest in protecting the music industry but if any music sharing services were making profit from letting their users share MP3 files without paying any licensing fees to the music publishers, I would find it unethical too. If such a service were to donate 50% of their profit, would it make their business ethical? I’d say no. If donating 50% of the profit makes anything OK, hell, let’s sell drugs or steal other people’s properties, and donate half of it.

Furthermore, the problem with this type of Robin-hood-esque self-righteousness is that it disregards the rights of others and disrespects the differences in opinion about what constitutes good and bad. They put themselves up on a moral high ground and force others to eat their moral standards. To add insult to injury, DoGood is making money from that process. I would question the integrity of any organizations that pay DoGood to deliver their ads.

Let’s not get fooled by these shrewd people who abuse good causes for their own benefit.

UPDATES AND CORRECTIONS:

In the discussion that follows this post, the founder of DoGood Faisal Sethi and I debated the details of this post. I initially said that I did not misunderstand anything, but there is one thing I did misunderstand and should correct. The criteria for being on their exemption list is not based on what banners the publishers serve. They are evaluated by the content of their sites, and this evaluation is “subjective”, meaning DoGood decides what passes as “good”.

They actually do not discriminate the banner ads they are swapping. That is, even if the publishers are serving philanthropic banners, DoGood will replace them with their own philanthropic banners, essentially depriving the publishers of their rights to decide what is “good”. He tries to argue this by saying the users can at any point view the original banners by a mouse click, but this is clearly a disingenuous answer. Who would deliberately choose to see banner ads?

Faisal emailed me and said that he no longer wishes to continue this debate, so the discussion is closed. The reason why he does not want to continue is because he believes I’m accusing him of deliberate misconduct. I’d like to clarify that. From the tone of my writing above, I admit that the readers could interpret it that way. So, I should clarify: I do not believe what they do is a deliberate misconduct (like Spammers). I think they are blinded by their own self-righteousness. This is why I described them as “Robin-hood-esque”. Their “good” intensions are misguided and therefore have grave consequences for many publishers and content creators. This is what I’m concerned about and tried to debate about.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page

Should Facebook Have the Power to Decide Who Gets Banned?

I didn’t know that your Facebook account could be banned so easily. My own account is fine, but I discovered that many people have had their accounts disabled. Once your account is disabled (Facebook doesn’t tell you why), you disappear completely. No trace of you, like you never existed on Facebook. This leads me to question the current laws protecting consumers. I’ll discuss that a bit later; first, here are the results of my research on this topic.

When I Googled for “Facebook disabled”, I found many people complaining about their accounts getting disabled. One person created a whole website dedicated to it. This writer on The New York Observer described the social consequences of getting banned from Facebook. Craig Daitch on Advertising Age sounds quite angry about the whole thing.

I found many different reasons for the ban. One of the comments said that Craig Daitch repeatedly sent requests to one person to be a friend. The writer of the Observer article was banned because he cited a part of someone else’s profile on his blog. I also found someone getting banned from using a software utility that saves your Facebook contact info. Apparently, you could also get banned from sending too many private messages to people you don’t know, having too many friends, or just using Facebook too often. In most of the cases, it was Facebook’s automated script that flagged and disabled these accounts. So, be careful, if you are very passionate about promoting your political cause on Facebook.

Although it is important for Facebook to control certain user behaviors (such as Spammers and stalkers), it is also important that we users have some say in how such policies are established and enforced. You might say, “But Facebook is a business. They own it, so they should be able to do whatever they want.” Legally this is true, but I think the laws should be changed for any product where its primary value is derived from the sheer number of users. In many cases, the reason for the popularity is actually the popularity itself. People flock to it not because it is the best product, but because they feel socially pressured to. Microsoft Windows is the best example of this. Most people who use Windows are not particularly happy with it; they use it because they are required to at work, and the businesses use it because that’s what everyone else uses.

It’s like how English became the most popular language in the world. Many students around the world are required to study English in school, but it’s not because English is the best language; it’s simply because it is the most popular. In order to increase efficiency, stay competitive, and promote better communication, we often have to do what others do out of no choice of our own. When such a situation is established for a product or a website, the company who owns it should not have complete control over what they can do with their users. After all, they are deriving great values from us; the values that they didn’t create themselves. What we want in such a product isn’t so much the product they created but the other users. eBay, Craig’s List, Apple’s iTunes, and some Google products are good examples.

These products and websites take full advantage of so-called “user-generated content”. The vast majority of the contents we enjoy on Facebook are not generated by Facebook, we the users generate them. What a sweet business! In comparison, sites like NYTimes.com have to spend a lot of money generating their contents, but they don’t get any more money from their advertisers than Facebook does (for the same number of impressions and click-throughs).

Since we are all contributing contents to Facebook, we deserve to have some say in how Facebook regulates their users. For this to happen, the laws have to change (I think). This goes beyond the concept of monopoly. (Perhaps closer to the legal concept of “public figure”.) Even for a relatively small site, if the contents are user-generated, the users should have some say in its user policies. It’s only fair; don’t you think?

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page

Whole Foods Boycott Turns Politics into Personal Attack

As you may already know, the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey’s opinion piece on Wall Street Journal has spawned a Facebook Group to boycott Whole Foods. And, according to the article on Mashable, the damage the group has caused is now real. Personally, I do not believe that boycotting a business for the political opinions expressed by its CEO is a proper way to resolve political differences. In fact, I believe it’s ultimately harmful for us all, particularly for this healthcare debate.

Let’s face it, there is no perfect solution for our healthcare problem. Every solution will have its own shares of pros and cons. Everyone will have to make compromises, so it’s only fair that we listen to different views, opinions, and ideas. It’s not a game where we try to win by any means necessary.

You can boycott Whole Foods for their business practice, but not for the CEO expressing his opinions. Doing so is like your boss firing you because you voted for someone he doesn’t like. When we face someone who is far more powerful than we are, we tend to become blind to our own abuse of power because it is very small in comparison. Individual consumers do also have power. It is true that the CEO of Whole Foods is far more powerful than we are, but this is a matter of principle. For instance, even in a fight with someone much bigger and stronger than you, the fact that you are much weaker does not justify the use of violence. This is why Gandhi’s strategy worked because he refused to resort to the same dirty strategy that the British empire was using.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” because when we have it, we don’t realize that we have it, because we only look at the people who are more powerful than we are. Power is of course a matter of degree. Boycotting a business is certainly an expression of our power. The only difference is the degree.

Would you fire your employee for expressing his political opinions? Most of us would say no. If so, why “fire” Whole Foods for the CEO expressing his political opinions? I would “fire” Whole Foods if their actual business practice bothered me, but not for the CEO expressing his political opinions.

My power to “fire” Whole Foods is tiny, but to me, it is the same exercise of power as firing my employees just at a much smaller scale. So, if I do not believe in firing someone for his political positions, I would not do that to a business, even if they are much more powerful than I am.

A company that I once did some consulting work for, lost one of their big clients one year. After a little research about the client, they discovered that one of their executives saw Planned Parenthood listed as a client on the company’s website, and that prompted them to end their business relationship. It was a financial retaliation over political differences. This type of hostile strategies to fight our political opponents can only divide us further. Do we ultimately want to get along with one another or do we want to divide ourselves further? If we want to get along, why couldn’t we see this type of situation as an opportunity to get to know one another and to see the point of view of the other?

Now that the damage of the boycott is real, the fight has become personal. If John Mackey is angry enough, he could stop hiring people who express any support for Obama’s healthcare reform, although I really doubt that Mackey would do such a thing. If this is a proper way to do politics, then why stop at Whole Foods? Why don’t the Democrats boycott all businesses whose CEOs are Republican, and the Republicans boycott all businesses run by Democratic CEOs? Why should we boycott only the businesses whose CEOs expressed their opinions publicly? How about the quiet ones? They are saved just because they are quiet?

It’s easy to see how this type of strategy can escalate to a point where both sides simply become more resolute about their own opinions, unwilling to consider any other ideas or solutions. It becomes a matter of winning, not of finding the best compromises. The American politics is already too personal and hurtful. Do we need to make it any worse?

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page

Should Your Business Contacts Be on Facebook?

This is a dilemma that many people face when they receive friend requests from their business associates. In fact, some people deliberately avoid signing up with Facebook because they do not want to face this dilemma. Those who do not want business associates as their Facebook friends commonly express their desire to keep the business world separate from their personal world. Some people are even critical of others who do not keep the two worlds separate, seeing them as cunning businessmen who view every friend as a potential business.

I believe this is a symptom of the corporatization of our culture. A hundred years ago, most people assumed that they would be running their own business one day, either by starting their own from scratch or by taking over the family business. In this type of small-town environment, you did business with people who lived in your own neighborhood. They were both friends and business associates. There were no clear lines. After all, wouldn’t it be nicer if we could do business with our friends and mutually benefit as a result? Why do we feel the need to separate business from personal?

Here is my theory: It’s because working for a corporation forces you to create two separate personas, and because you don’t like your own business persona. Wanting to keep the two worlds separate is an expression of self-hatred. When you work for someone else, you are not allowed to be who you are. You are representing the company you work for. In other words, you are acting a role in the script written by the corporation. Every company has a culture with its own values, codes, standards, philosophies, objectives, etc.. You are getting paid to represent those things. When you are in the army, you have to kill people even if you are against harming others. The same holds true for working for corporations; you are not going to agree with everything they believe in. You often have to put yourself aside and act in the interests of the corporation. That’s what you are getting paid for. This is fine while you are still young, and still learning about the world and the life in general, but sooner or later, you have to be yourself and express yourself as you naturally are. That’s what evolution would want you to do too. Otherwise, you will eventually forget who you really are.

It’s true; some people do see every friend as a potential customer, and they don’t drop the business persona ever. I agree that this is tiresome and annoying, but the reason why this is annoying is because they decided to let their business personas take over their true selves. This is what most people assume when they see someone who does not draw the line between business and personal; they assume that the business side takes over the personal side. But it does not have to be that way. What if you let your true self take over your business persona? That is, you eliminate your business persona altogether. This is basically what happens in a small community. Everyone knows everyone else. One person’s problem (personal or business) is everyone’s problem. In such a community, there is no point in creating a business persona.

Our culture now has become so corporatized that we have forgotten what it is like to be ourselves. We simply assume that keeping up two separate personas is a requirement in life. We’ve accepted it as a reality and learned to cope with it. But, deep down, we don’t like it. We crave to be ourselves, so we try to guard our private world as if it’s a sacred sanctuary. And, when someone from the business world tries to invade our sanctuary, we feel repulsed. We need a space to be ourselves and stop acting a role in the corporate theater.

But, here is the good news. I believe this concern about keeping up two separate personas is overblown. It’s like the soldiers who were hiding in a jungle for years after the end of World War II. Many people still believe that putting up a generic business facade is the best way to succeed. Not just individuals, but many businesses still believe this. They try not to offend or turn off any potential customers by presenting themselves in the most generic and conservative way possible. I believe that this is a dangerous strategy in today’s digital world where filteration of information is super-efficient.

Let’s suppose you need to print new business cards for yourself. You know how efficient the search engines are these days, so you wouldn’t just search for “printer”. You would search for “business card printer”, because a company that prints business cards all the time would probably be cheaper than a generic printing company who prints anything and everything. Well, you know that you could be even more specific. So, you search for “business card printer in New York”. Guess what? Even that returns too many results. So, you want to be even more specific. You then search for “eco-friendly business card printer in New York”. Now you have a more manageable number of choices. Who knows, you might even be able to find an eco-friendly business card printer in New York who voted for Obama, if that’s what you want.

Let’s think about what we just did. Every time we tweaked the search words, we essentially eliminated businesses that present themselves generically. The more generic they are, the quicker they get eliminated. This is the world we live in now. So, if you put up a generic facade that does not offend or excite anyone, you get eliminated quickly. If this is true, why bother trying to put up any facade? Why not just be yourself so that other likeminded people can find you easily and quickly?

Let’s get back to our original topic of discussion. Facebook can be a great business tool if you did not put up a business persona, that is, if you insisted on being yourself. Then, you can accept any friend requests. I often write and post things that are potentially damaging to my business, but I go ahead and do it if I sincerely believe it, because there will always be a small number of people who share the same opinion or view. It’s OK even if a lot of people are offended by it because it’s better to have a few people who really like me than to have hundreds of people who do not think anything of me. Being generic is the most dangerous thing to be in today’s world.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page

Statistical Bootstrapping — a Product Development Strategy

I’m pretty convinced that this digital world is all about creating something viral. “Go viral or go home,” as I heard someone say on the Web. But going viral is largely a matter of luck. So, as a business, the luck has to be managed in a statistical manner. In other words, we need to spread the eggs everywhere, instead of putting them all in one basket. This means that every project needs to be low budget (low enough for you to afford many of them). Avoid ideas that cost a lot of money. And, if the market bites any of them, you try to narrow down your choices around it. Once there is a big hit, you take the next logical step to grow/expand it, or use it as a launching pad for other ventures; and this time, you can increase the budget of each project. I would call this statistical bootstrapping. (Maybe there is already a name for this strategy. Let me know if you know it.)

Venture capitalists have been managing their investment risks in much the same way; the only difference is that I’m suggesting that we all adopt it even as an individual. And, when we individuals do it, it must be bootstrapped because of the lack of funding.

Even if something goes viral, if you don’t have a proper plan in place to take advantage of the success, it would just fall flat. Trying to figure out, after the fact, what the next step should be, wouldn’t work. So, even before you take on the project, you have to have a plan for what the next step should be. In other words, forget Plan B, think of Plan A2. (If Plan A doesn’t work, forget Plan B, just discard Plan A altogether.) This sounds like common sense, but I see many stories of success where they had nothing planned for an encore. They went up, exploded spectacularly, and disappeared like fireworks.

Because of the efficiency of the Internet, the cycle of producing, distributing, and analyzing our products is very quick these days (especially for digital products). The number of products being produced every year is astronomical. In this type of environment, it’s not wise to pour money into something that has not gone through this cycle on a smaller scale.

One of my clients just premiered a TV show which was based on a YouTube hit. The network is quite happy with its rating. This is a good example of putting money into something that has gone through the cycle at a smaller scale. I believe this type of approach will be more common in the future. I think pouring money into something just because someone really “believes in” it, is a thing of the past. There is no need to take that kind of risk anymore, when the risk can be managed more statistically. No need to believe it, just test it on a smaller scale.

You might argue that certain things cannot be done on a small scale, but when you haven’t had a track record of success, you shouldn’t be trying to direct a blockbuster Hollywood action movie anyway. Scale should come naturally as you become more successful. At first, we should think big, but do small.

Once we have a successful product on our resume, it should become much easier to raise funds too. We would then be in a privileged position, and this can reduce the amount of competition, and increase the probability of success. Then “bootstrapping” becomes less necessary.

I might be wrong here, but this is my current strategy anyway.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page

Originality Is Overrated

Years ago, I wrote a short essay about how originality is overrated (and execution underrated) in the Western culture. I see original/unique ideas as a very small part of the game in creating something successful.

The other day, I was thinking of how similar the fundamental idea is between Twitter and the site I created in 2001 called URLDJ.com (I shut it down a while ago.) In both cases, the primary function is to use human beings as a filter for information that is relevant to you as a reader. In URLDJ, you “subscribed” to (as opposed to “follow”) particular “DJs” with whom you shared interests, and the DJs would post links to their pages with brief descriptions.

Each DJ had a profile page that described who he/she is, and a series of links in a reverse-chronological order, which is essentially the same as Twitter’s profile page. The idea was (like it is with Twitter) that the universal home page was not the most important page. Individual profile pages or custom home pages were designed to be the access points for the readers. URLDJ offered a way to select (or filter out) DJs for the home page, so that you would only see the DJs you liked, which is basically what you see on Twitter after you login.

In retrospect, here are the factors that lead to URLDJ’s demise:

1. I should have let anyone create a DJ account. This is the biggest mistake. If I had done this, URLDJ might have been moderately successful. Even Twitter has a problem where many accounts are active for a short period of time, and they go dead. As easy as it is to share links and short comments, it’s not for everyone. It requires a specific set of natural inclinations. If I had let anyone create a DJ account, I would have been able to find DJs with these natural inclinations, and some of them could have thrived. I believe someone had suggested this at the time, but I disagreed.

2. I should have publicly displayed the number of subscribers. At the time, I felt like this should be private information, but this is a key factor that drives everyone to spread the word about Twitter. It’s a vanity factor that works well. Many people are striving to get hundreds or even thousands of followers, and this naturally promotes Twitter itself.

3. Timing. I think another key factor that made Twitter so popular is its use of mobile devices. At the time URLDJ launched, this wasn’t possible because the technology was not common, and also because people weren’t ready for it. So, it would have been a bad idea anyway. This shows how important the timing is. eMusic is a good example. They were one of the first online music retailers, and obviously they were way too early. Apple came in much later with the optimal timing.

When URLDJ first launched, I found another site which was doing essentially the same thing (I forgot their name/URL). I would imagine that many people (probably hundreds of people) had the same idea at the time. If true, the greatness of idea itself contributes only a few percents to the final success. The rest is all execution. Twitter had a combination of features and design that struck the right chord with the masses. It is also interesting to note that complexity and sophistication do not necessarily add to success. Twitter’s 140-character limitation, for instance, added to their success. What matters is having just the right things and doing it at the right time.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page