Rewarding corporate tippers through ad space

[lyndsysimon]

Per a comment from HN, posted in Issue 94:

[...] as you mention in the side note, companies can get ad space by donating in the fields they care about.

I think that's an interesting idea - it incentivises companies to participate, particularly if the only way to get ads on the site is to do so. As the community grows, more eyeballs are looking at the site. The more eyeballs you have, the more ad money is potentially available. Converting that "potential" money into "kinetic" money and then funneling it right into the communities that companies wanted to advertise to... Well, it seems like it would create a positive feedback loop.

One big potential problem is distribution, though. We would have to make sure that a supported category is broad enough that the company isn't supporting an individual, and that individuals don't get any more from that company than they normally would from any other type of tipper, to protect income stability.

Perhaps that could be solved by only allowing ad-buying tips to go into funds with enough tippees to dilute it down to a normal level. If you're wanting to buy ads for $x per week, and the maximum allowable tip is $5 / week, then you could only tip to funds comprising x / 5 tippees.

[chadwhitacre]

@lyndsysimon We already have one corporation, @workforpie, advertising itself through the Gittip givers leaderboard:

Community pages (#496) will be a natural fit for this use case, I think. Presumably we'll have a meta-fund (#449) for each community, and corporations will be able to give to the community as a whole and end up on the community page. That raises a good point about funds: we'll probably want to design the algorithm for funds such that larger gifts are allowed.

[chadwhitacre]

This is done.

[chadwhitacre]