IDEA #49 - Buy Music, Help Charities
By Steve Poland • April 5, 2007
A website setup with passionate music fans that do some writing. Then the entire iTunes catalog is on the site via their affiliate program (which is either via CJ or LinkShare). Everytime someone buys a song via a link on your site from iTunes, you receive $0.05 (or 5%) of the sale price.
You could setup the website so that all affiliate commissions go directly to one charity — or the user could select from a few charities that you have preselected. (Users could also suggest future charities).
Hopefully everyone would take the extra minute to then purchase the song via your website, rather that direct from iTunes — as to support these charities.
You could also do affiliate sales of music t-shirts, ipods, and everything else music related.
Another site that does this but not focused on a particular niche is iGive — they give a % of each purchase you make via their website to charities.
It’s just like when your school or organization got together to do a fundraiser — people all over the world that have various passions (niches) can collaborate to help raise money for others. It’s all about finding the communities online — they will work together to help make this world a better place, they just need the (web-based) tools to do so (including widgets).
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4 Responses to “IDEA #49 - Buy Music, Help Charities”
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Best idea ever! I’m in!
I attempted a similar idea with a Google search engine:
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Simply set the gcharity page to your homepage, and use it to make all your typical Google searches. Google then pays a portion of the ad revenue to gCharity which then donates it to charities. This is the same method that FireFox uses to make millions of dollars from its Google search home page.
Drew,
The success of gcharity is probably a good barometer for how well Steve’s idea would work. So, care to share any numbers?
During the past several months we’ve received almost no traffic, and a correspondingly small revenue of less than two dollars. However we have also not received any press or blog coverage. With some exposure, perhaps the idea would take off.