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'Searching' for Park Funding

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By Kurt Repanshek - November 2nd, 2006

    Here's a novel way to help raise funding for the national park system: Search the Internet.
    Yep, thanks to the folks at Yahoo!, there's now a search engine that will generate money for non-profits.
    The way it works is you make "Good Search" your search engine of choice. When you install the search engine, you're given a chance to select a charity that you'd like to raise money for. Then, every time you run a search, a portion of the advertising revenue that Yahoo! collects from the advertisers on those search pages will be directed to your charity of choice.
    How much can this generate? Last year Internet advertising generated about $6 billion for search engines. With Good Search, the folks at Yahoo! estimate that each individual search will generate one-cent for your charity.
    That seems like small change, but in cyberspace things build up quickly. For instance, if 10,000 national park advocates made Good Search their default search engine, Yahoo! calculates they would generate $73,000 a year for the park system simply by running two searches a day.
    I did a quick survey of Good Search charities/non-profits directly related to the national parks and found two: the National Park Foundation and National Parks Conservation Association.
    Seems like a simple fund-raiser, no?

Comments

Submitted by admin on November 2, 2006 - 9:01am.
Perhaps not. Do you know how much goes to the charities vs. how much goes to the company that put this service together? The company that created this site is servicing thousands of charities. Even if their cut is small compared to the percent they pass to the charities, this hosting company may profit handsomely. Not that that's such a big a problem. Even if that isn't the case, this is one more instance of the sort of fiscally-driven intrusion I like so little. Or, to be more direct, this is an example of the sort of fiscally-driven intrusion I actively dislike. As for the two NP-related charities being serviced, they are examples of charities most heavily inclined to promote fiscally-driven intrusions in support of corporate beneficiaries.

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