In 2006, Craigslist’s CEO Jim Buckmaster said that if enough users told them to “raise revenue and plow it into charity” that they would consider doing it. (source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4082 ) They really do listen to their users and the reason there is no advertising on Craigslist is that no one is asking for it.
A single banner ad on Craigslist would raise at least one billion for charity over five years. They could put a large “X” next to the ad, allowing you to permanently close it. There seems to be little objection to this idea. The optional banner is harmless, and a billion dollars could be enough to dramatically improve the lives of millions, save very real people from lifetimes of torture or slavery, or make a serious impact in the causes we take seriously around here. As a moral calculus, the decision is a no brainer. So we just need a critical mass of Craigslist users telling Jim that we need a banner ad on Craigslist. Per a somewhat recent email to Craig, they are still receptive to this idea if the users suggest it.
The numbers involved are a little insane. Fifty thousand people should count as critical mass, which means each person could effectively cause $20,000 to be generated out of nowhere and donated to charity. My mistake last time was doing it as a Facebook group rather than a Facebook fan page, where the more useful viral functions have moved. This time I would also drop the money on advertising to get an easy initial critical mass.
Initially voted down because I was sure it was going to be stupid, but this is the first crazy idea I’ve ever heard for generating a billion dollars out of nothing that could actually work. I mean, ever. You win some kind of award.
That’s actually a significant problem to overcome with the virality here—the idea is complicated enough that it needs a solid paragraph or two to be explained, whereas for max virality it needs to be snappy enough to fit in 200 characters or so.
“Join this group to raise $20,000 for charity!” is normally a nearly ideal viral meme and in this case is true, but since 99.99% of things like this are fake people are annoyed by meme copy that is obviously not true, even though it is actually true. What I’m leaning towards now is something about “togetherness”, how together we can make a difference or something. I am very open to suggestions on this point.
“Craigslist users matter. 100 million lives could be saved by a billion dollars. That’s ONE banner ad on CL for five years—for charity. Craig’ll do it if we ask for it. We just need to ask.”
194 characters.
Hotlink the word ask to a page with a larger pitch that’s one more click away from the place they need to type. The $20k per person thing goes in the larger pitch.
I think the people doing it would have to actually be regular CL people. Maybe see about checking first with CL forums in big metro areas… make a meetup out of it maybe? I don’t personally think its money “out of nothing” though. Even if people don’t feel the “epistemic pain” I suspect ads do impose a dust speck style cost on their viewers.
I agree. I’m not even sure if there are hard-to-explain methods for that price.
If you were really going to do it you’d want to figure out a lot more about the details (like where to direct the money to maximize the goodness of the outcome in a way that was intelligible to people, and whether ads of the sort proposed could really generate the predicted amount).
But the numbers you ended up with could be plugged into the text without changing the emotional impact. The pitch is aimed at people’s sense of “making a difference” and “belonging to a community” and “being heard” and so on, not at their excitement for dollar-efficient charity. The stated problem was the difficulty of pressing the right buttons in a compact and readable way that would (hopefully) get viral traction.
The numbers just have to be enough to feel like they matter for the text to be sufficient. The emotional impact of “Half a million...” versus “100 million” is probably not large, even if the real world impact is 200 times less. This is (if I understand correctly) the whole point of the “shut up and multiply” slogan in this community—recognition of our lack of cognitive sensitivity to numerical differences.
But that is part of what I meant about the fact that its really not money “out of nothing”. Watching a single ad costs you something. Equally, a trillion ad impressions is a lot of cost to impose on people’s minds. At some point, the damage to CL and the world might really be worse than the number of lives saved.
It’s not clear to me that the relative impacts could even be worked out in advance… if ads were put up according to the whims of the passionate few, the money ended up in dumb places, there was a backlash and CL’s functioning as an institution people can trust was damaged, and the world economy had X amount of value destroyed thereby, then the whole thing might be a net negative. The damage to CL’s reputation with people who didn’t understand why the ads had suddenly appeared might have to be monitored in real time rather than predicted in advance.
But assuming there was an honestly great thing to be gained that was really blocked by nothing more than a bit of text… well… there was some text to work as the first draft :-)
As for “regular Craigslist people”, the people who post on the forums are not regular Craigslist people. Maybe some of the local forums are representative Craigslist users, but the Craigslist meta-discussion forum where this would be on-topic has particularly hardcore users. I expect the regular posters in the Craigslist feedback forum to respond negatively to this because they do not like change. I can’t know until I ask, but I think we want to build some momentum separately before making the case to the people who populate the Craigslist feedback forum.
Most people are Craigslist users. I’ve certainly used it and I expect >50% of people here have used Craigslist at least once. I guess my point is that whatever people we get to do this will effectively count as regular CL people. Craigslist is a public service that is supposed to belong to everyone, right?
I do think that converting hardcore Craigslist users to our cause is a good target, as they will have more influence and will be willing to work harder.
This is probably my fault for not looking at the right reference class again, but most people don’t have Internet access. stats (though most North Americans and (by a tiny margin) Europeans do)
Yeah, reference class thing, I meant most North American internet users have used and are aware of Craigslist. Even someone who doesn’t use it regularly, but is aware of Craigslist’s existence and when it is useful counts as a user, imo.
Sure, that’s advertising though. The vast majority of people on facebook wouldn’t be put off by such a title, even after reading the full description and learning that the words “a BILLION” should have actually read “potentially a billion”. Regardless, you can replace “BILLION” with any non-specific alternative.
“Convince Craigslist to donate a ton of money to charity!”
I actually think there could be a decent angle in promoting your group like similar groups with some simpleminded emphasis that your group is different, e.g. “How to ACTUALLY raise money for charity with just a few clicks” or some improved variant of that. I know I would be curious enough to click.
As a moral calculus, the decision is a no brainer.
Not unless you agree with the charity in question. Say some people request a pro-life charity, and some people request a pro-choice charity; some people want to donate to African aid agencies, and some people want to oppose African aid agencies because they think they’re harmful. Depending on the charity chosen, many people would want to oppose this decision.
Indeed, there are huge differences between how much good the best charities accomplish and how much good the middle of the road charities accomplish. I am not sure why this was downvoted.
That’s true, I suppose, but it shouldn’t be hard to make sure that a sizable minority of the funds are doing real good in the world. I’m very open to ideas as to how to optimally have a community distribute the money, but that seems like a problem that we can solve when we get there. I also expect that Craig and Jim themselves would have strong opinions about the charities involved. I’m going to put a top level post up shortly; we can move all discussion there.
each person could effectively cause $20,000 to be generated out of nowhere
As a rationalist, when you see a strange number like this, you have to ask yourself:
Did I really just discover a way to make lots of money very efficiently?
Or could it be that there was a mistake in my arithmetic somewhere?
That one billion dollars is not being generated out of nowhere.
It is being generated as payment for ad clicks. Let’s check your assumptions:
How much money will the average user generate from banner ad clicks in five years?
How many users does Craigslist have?
What fraction of those users would have to request banner ads, for Craigslist to add them?
My completely uneducated guess is 100$, ten million, and 50%.
This matches your “generate one billion dollars” number but suggests that critical mass would be five million rather than fifty thousand.
Note, also, that Facebook users are not necessarily Craigslist users.
I would be interested to hear what numbers you are using.
Mine could easily be wrong.
What’s the best charity (in utilitarian terms) that might get 50,000 supporters? ISTM that starting a Facebook group is a good way to find 50,000 to request Craig’s list ads.
I think I have a good answer for this, but I’m going to be trying to figure out a better one. By now I know the people running most of the rational philanthropy orgs.
Maybe something against nuclear proliferation? Even then, that cause does not seem to inspire people deeply anymore. I had planned on letting the users themselves pick where the money goes, something like proportional voting charity distribution. Basically, if we lead this, I think we’d have enough control and influence that we could convince users to vote for the money to go to our pet causes, even if the majority is going to mainstream causes.
There might be enough work involved in community management that it made sense to hire a full time employee to organize the charitable distributions—if someone from the community took that job, it would again give our causes more influence.
Twitter will also be a useful tool. Craig obsessively checks his Twitter and replies to most messages, so once we get what we feel to be a useful mass we can start aggressively tweeting at Craig. But to me, it seems logical to get the users organized on Facebook before moving on to Twitter, as I don’t want to blow annoying Craig on Twitter by annoying him just enough to ignore us, but not enough to do what we say.
:) Sorry.
In 2006, Craigslist’s CEO Jim Buckmaster said that if enough users told them to “raise revenue and plow it into charity” that they would consider doing it. (source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4082 ) They really do listen to their users and the reason there is no advertising on Craigslist is that no one is asking for it.
A single banner ad on Craigslist would raise at least one billion for charity over five years. They could put a large “X” next to the ad, allowing you to permanently close it. There seems to be little objection to this idea. The optional banner is harmless, and a billion dollars could be enough to dramatically improve the lives of millions, save very real people from lifetimes of torture or slavery, or make a serious impact in the causes we take seriously around here. As a moral calculus, the decision is a no brainer. So we just need a critical mass of Craigslist users telling Jim that we need a banner ad on Craigslist. Per a somewhat recent email to Craig, they are still receptive to this idea if the users suggest it.
The numbers involved are a little insane. Fifty thousand people should count as critical mass, which means each person could effectively cause $20,000 to be generated out of nowhere and donated to charity. My mistake last time was doing it as a Facebook group rather than a Facebook fan page, where the more useful viral functions have moved. This time I would also drop the money on advertising to get an easy initial critical mass.
Initially voted down because I was sure it was going to be stupid, but this is the first crazy idea I’ve ever heard for generating a billion dollars out of nothing that could actually work. I mean, ever. You win some kind of award.
That’s actually a significant problem to overcome with the virality here—the idea is complicated enough that it needs a solid paragraph or two to be explained, whereas for max virality it needs to be snappy enough to fit in 200 characters or so.
“Join this group to raise $20,000 for charity!” is normally a nearly ideal viral meme and in this case is true, but since 99.99% of things like this are fake people are annoyed by meme copy that is obviously not true, even though it is actually true. What I’m leaning towards now is something about “togetherness”, how together we can make a difference or something. I am very open to suggestions on this point.
“Craigslist users matter. 100 million lives could be saved by a billion dollars. That’s ONE banner ad on CL for five years—for charity. Craig’ll do it if we ask for it. We just need to ask.”
194 characters.
Hotlink the word ask to a page with a larger pitch that’s one more click away from the place they need to type. The $20k per person thing goes in the larger pitch.
I think the people doing it would have to actually be regular CL people. Maybe see about checking first with CL forums in big metro areas… make a meetup out of it maybe? I don’t personally think its money “out of nothing” though. Even if people don’t feel the “epistemic pain” I suspect ads do impose a dust speck style cost on their viewers.
But those numbers are grossly wrong. $10 per life saved isn’t true of any easy-to-explain method.
I agree. I’m not even sure if there are hard-to-explain methods for that price.
If you were really going to do it you’d want to figure out a lot more about the details (like where to direct the money to maximize the goodness of the outcome in a way that was intelligible to people, and whether ads of the sort proposed could really generate the predicted amount).
But the numbers you ended up with could be plugged into the text without changing the emotional impact. The pitch is aimed at people’s sense of “making a difference” and “belonging to a community” and “being heard” and so on, not at their excitement for dollar-efficient charity. The stated problem was the difficulty of pressing the right buttons in a compact and readable way that would (hopefully) get viral traction.
The numbers just have to be enough to feel like they matter for the text to be sufficient. The emotional impact of “Half a million...” versus “100 million” is probably not large, even if the real world impact is 200 times less. This is (if I understand correctly) the whole point of the “shut up and multiply” slogan in this community—recognition of our lack of cognitive sensitivity to numerical differences.
But that is part of what I meant about the fact that its really not money “out of nothing”. Watching a single ad costs you something. Equally, a trillion ad impressions is a lot of cost to impose on people’s minds. At some point, the damage to CL and the world might really be worse than the number of lives saved.
It’s not clear to me that the relative impacts could even be worked out in advance… if ads were put up according to the whims of the passionate few, the money ended up in dumb places, there was a backlash and CL’s functioning as an institution people can trust was damaged, and the world economy had X amount of value destroyed thereby, then the whole thing might be a net negative. The damage to CL’s reputation with people who didn’t understand why the ads had suddenly appeared might have to be monitored in real time rather than predicted in advance.
But assuming there was an honestly great thing to be gained that was really blocked by nothing more than a bit of text… well… there was some text to work as the first draft :-)
Asteroid defence, for one: http://jgmatheny.org/matheny_extinction_risk.htm
Anna Salamon gives an estimate for lives the SIAI can save per dollar in this talk: http://vimeo.com/7397629
That is a good 194 characters.
As for “regular Craigslist people”, the people who post on the forums are not regular Craigslist people. Maybe some of the local forums are representative Craigslist users, but the Craigslist meta-discussion forum where this would be on-topic has particularly hardcore users. I expect the regular posters in the Craigslist feedback forum to respond negatively to this because they do not like change. I can’t know until I ask, but I think we want to build some momentum separately before making the case to the people who populate the Craigslist feedback forum.
Most people are Craigslist users. I’ve certainly used it and I expect >50% of people here have used Craigslist at least once. I guess my point is that whatever people we get to do this will effectively count as regular CL people. Craigslist is a public service that is supposed to belong to everyone, right?
I do think that converting hardcore Craigslist users to our cause is a good target, as they will have more influence and will be willing to work harder.
This is probably my fault for not looking at the right reference class again, but most people don’t have Internet access. stats (though most North Americans and (by a tiny margin) Europeans do)
Yeah, reference class thing, I meant most North American internet users have used and are aware of Craigslist. Even someone who doesn’t use it regularly, but is aware of Craigslist’s existence and when it is useful counts as a user, imo.
“Help Craigslist donate a BILLION dollars to charity!”
“Support Craigslist in donating a BILLION dollars to charity!”
“Convince Craigslist to donate a BILLION dollars to charity!”
In order of increasing truthiness and decreasing pizazz.
Using the word BILLION in all the marketing without good evidence that’s what’s at stake seems dubious.
Sure, that’s advertising though. The vast majority of people on facebook wouldn’t be put off by such a title, even after reading the full description and learning that the words “a BILLION” should have actually read “potentially a billion”. Regardless, you can replace “BILLION” with any non-specific alternative.
“Convince Craigslist to donate a ton of money to charity!”
I actually think there could be a decent angle in promoting your group like similar groups with some simpleminded emphasis that your group is different, e.g. “How to ACTUALLY raise money for charity with just a few clicks” or some improved variant of that. I know I would be curious enough to click.
Not unless you agree with the charity in question. Say some people request a pro-life charity, and some people request a pro-choice charity; some people want to donate to African aid agencies, and some people want to oppose African aid agencies because they think they’re harmful. Depending on the charity chosen, many people would want to oppose this decision.
Using meta-charities like GiveWell might help make the choice of charity less controversial.
Indeed, there are huge differences between how much good the best charities accomplish and how much good the middle of the road charities accomplish. I am not sure why this was downvoted.
That’s true, I suppose, but it shouldn’t be hard to make sure that a sizable minority of the funds are doing real good in the world. I’m very open to ideas as to how to optimally have a community distribute the money, but that seems like a problem that we can solve when we get there. I also expect that Craig and Jim themselves would have strong opinions about the charities involved. I’m going to put a top level post up shortly; we can move all discussion there.
I’d make a top level post on this right now if it wouldn’t steal your karma.
As a rationalist, when you see a strange number like this, you have to ask yourself: Did I really just discover a way to make lots of money very efficiently? Or could it be that there was a mistake in my arithmetic somewhere?
That one billion dollars is not being generated out of nowhere. It is being generated as payment for ad clicks.
Let’s check your assumptions: How much money will the average user generate from banner ad clicks in five years? How many users does Craigslist have? What fraction of those users would have to request banner ads, for Craigslist to add them?
My completely uneducated guess is 100$, ten million, and 50%. This matches your “generate one billion dollars” number but suggests that critical mass would be five million rather than fifty thousand. Note, also, that Facebook users are not necessarily Craigslist users.
I would be interested to hear what numbers you are using. Mine could easily be wrong.
That’s amazing if true. It’s consistent with the background I’ve heard on Craigslist though.
Jim Buckmaster has what is by far my favorite CEO biography.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/jim_buckmaster
What’s the best charity (in utilitarian terms) that might get 50,000 supporters? ISTM that starting a Facebook group is a good way to find 50,000 to request Craig’s list ads.
I think I have a good answer for this, but I’m going to be trying to figure out a better one. By now I know the people running most of the rational philanthropy orgs.
Maybe something against nuclear proliferation? Even then, that cause does not seem to inspire people deeply anymore. I had planned on letting the users themselves pick where the money goes, something like proportional voting charity distribution. Basically, if we lead this, I think we’d have enough control and influence that we could convince users to vote for the money to go to our pet causes, even if the majority is going to mainstream causes.
There might be enough work involved in community management that it made sense to hire a full time employee to organize the charitable distributions—if someone from the community took that job, it would again give our causes more influence.
Twitter will also be a useful tool. Craig obsessively checks his Twitter and replies to most messages, so once we get what we feel to be a useful mass we can start aggressively tweeting at Craig. But to me, it seems logical to get the users organized on Facebook before moving on to Twitter, as I don’t want to blow annoying Craig on Twitter by annoying him just enough to ignore us, but not enough to do what we say.