I will donate one dollar to charity for every comment on this post, up to one dollar.

This holiday, we wanted to enable the Chrome community to work together for a good cause. Starting today, we invite you to support five worthy causes by counting and “donating” the tabs you open in Chrome.

Everyone’s total tabs will determine a charitable donation made on behalf of the Chrome community, up to one million dollars.

In other words: we want people to switch to Chrome and have a one million dollar advertising budget to make it happen. Otherwise they would just skip the bullshit and donate the million dollars they’re already committed to donating.

It’s still charity, kind of, so I’m not so very mad at you, Google. Those million dollars are multitasking, at least. It’s better than TV ads or billboards. But I challenge just one company to just one time run a campaign like this without including the words “up to ______ dollars”.

Ya know, I suppose there are possibly some nice tax benefits to “donating to charity” as advertising. That might explain why companies do this kind of thing so often. It’s also a very good form of advertising to choose if you’re trying to get people to think nice thoughts about your product or service, most definitely (while not even realizing that they’re being advertised at!)

5 thoughts on “I will donate one dollar to charity for every comment on this post, up to one dollar.

  1. Commenting for charity. Make cheques payable to “The Human Fund”

  2. It seems like apathy is becoming increasingly easier. For example, you can “like” a cause on facebook, thereby stating you care about something, without really doing anything about the thing you care about.

  3. Have to give you props for this post. I recently vented about this very thing in a forum for (of all things) skeptics, and found that people were practically shouting me down for “having something against charity.” Tell ya what, Yoplait, how about you just donate the money to breast cancer and then feel free to advertise it. But don’t hold your donation for ransom in order to generate sales.

    Glad to see someone out there thinks along the same lines.

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