makoAvichai Tenenbaum and Chen Bareket volunteered to build AdUP, a Chrome extension that donates to nonprofits with every new tab.
Quotes by Chen Bareket
Selected excerpts from the interview.
We're essentially replacing the website — we take the money, but pass it directly to a nonprofit that the users choose.
We both sat down and thought about what the biggest problems in the social world are, and the biggest problem is money. We held meetings with CEOs and they said it's their biggest problem — you don't have to be a genius to understand that. Nonprofits have been collapsing in recent years, and it started during COVID, when one in four nonprofits closed. Just this week data was published showing that 71% of nonprofits report economic and financial difficulties.
The goal is to set small, achievable targets. For every tab opened with ads, the advertiser pays between half an agora and an agora. A thousand users will generate about 1,750 shekels a month. Fifty thousand users will generate about 85,000 shekels a month, which is over a million shekels a year. That's money that comes out of nothing.
We want to get the wheels moving.
It's not black and white. There are extensions that won't block and some that will. You can also always exempt specific ads in AdUP.
AdUP began with a business-model question, not a technology question: how can a resource already flowing through a system be redirected toward public value? It is social innovation that connects a simple economic mechanism to a social purpose.