Watch To Donate creates videos that are streamed on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. All revenue collected from ads, views and clicks is donated to different charities.

We feed two birds with one scone: users are doing something they normally do anyways — watching social media videos or playing mobile games — but are helping causes they care about at the same time.

We’ve received lot’s of positive feedback, especially from people who do not have the money to donate to charities in the classical sense, but are still stressed about the topics of climate change or social justice.

We are using several different approaches. We started on YouTube,  but our videos monetization rates sharply decreased as users clicked on every single add displayed in our videos. The platforms algorithm recognizes this and suspects non-authentic behavior. We therefore inform our audience to not click on every ad we display.

Creating apps also creates a lot of revenue. With approximately 8,700 users we were able to collect about 760 dollars so far with our apps Play To Donate and Memorize to Donate. They are available for free in the Play Store and App Store and entirely financed through ads.

For us, TikTok is our primary platform, with an audience of 50,000 , it works completely view based. However, we experienced being put down when our videos received too much attention. The power concentration on these platforms are an obstacle to our strategy. On this platform we mainly focus on using songs from artists who are giving us money because we are promoting their song within our video, along with sponsorships from businesses like Mo.Na. Gems.

We do not make people watch things they would not watch otherwise. On TikTok for example, we are producing content that follows current trends. By exploiting these trends, we are catching the users’ attention and use our platform to spread hope that we can fight all the issues in the world. This takes quite a lot of planning.

Yes, we are collaborating with other platforms or businesses that are either doing similar things or following similar interests such as climate change or social issues. Our first collaboration partner was Tab for Tab for a Cause, which is a browser extension also donating its revenue.

Or an Etsy shop called Rachel’s Small Creations, where 100% goes to various charities. Another is with biodegradable resin  jewelry store Mo. Na. Gems where people get 10% off their purchase and 10% is donated with the  discount code “w2d”. Also, we are collaborating with musicians on Spotify like Michelle Teh. All proceeds generated from the streaming goes towards charity.

And then we have been following the same principle of donating on a more local scale. We created the Watch To Donate Family Fund. Locality became important for us, because we believe that the idea of people helping people near them, helping their neighbors for example, creates more attention.

And creating more attention helps us to raise more money for good causes. And as our follower base from social media was already big, we thought if everyone would only give one dollar, we would collect a lot of money. So this is more classical fundraising.

The charities are usually chosen due to current events, the best matching deal or because of our personal interests. We do not have a specific process of choosing charities.

This is an interesting question that I have not thought about before. But I am very interested in this topic. If Watch To Donate had infinite budget, we would of course create our own platform and advertising agency for doing all what we do.

But for now we have to stick to the companies which are providing these services. Those companies are usually not very ethical, but Watch To Donate is at least contributing to improvement by utilizing their services for good.

We are always looking for more collaborations with influencers, non-profit organizations, and business!Expanding the music streaming donations and mobile apps is something we will focus on in the future.

Tab for a Cause is an extremely easy way to raise money for non-profits doing something you already do, open tabs. With Tab for a Cause, each time you open a tab you'll see a beatiful background image and a couple banner ads. We use the revenue from the banner ads to support non-profits. Free, easy, impactful.

The main aim is that everyone can raise money for charity, even if they don’t have real money to give away and donate. The product itself has a pretty background and a search bar and it is showing small display ads which users don’t have to click but every time an ad is shown, this creates money which is then donated.

To date, Tabbers have raised over $1.5M for non-profits! Right now, we donate at least 30% of our total revenue to charity. We decided to pledge a % of our total revenue instead of profit because it is a number that cannot be manipulated through accounting or large costs. In the long-term, our goal is to keep growing Tab for a Cause so we can increase our overall impact. That requires a talented team working full-time and being paid a living wage for their work. We envision a future where our community of Tabbers is a large force for good in the world.

We are paid by advertisers for each ad shown on the tab page. We use that revenue to support non-profits. We currently work with a wide variety of ad networks including Google, OpenX, Magnite, Index, Amazon, and Yahoo. Currently all of these network bid on the ad space each time the page is loaded, and the highest bid wins the space and pays us for it. In the long-term, we hope to work directly with brands that also support the causes we are supporting and cut out the ad networks.

We are using Google Ads. Advertisers are paying for the ads that are shown. And every time an ad is shown, this creates money that we then donate.

We do block a bunch of broad categories of ads (18+, alcohol, political ads, etc.), but beyond that, the ads showing are simply the ones that bid the most in the auction. We use the same system that most content websites use, so if you visit a news website, you should similar ads to what you see on Tab for a Cause. Eventually, we hope to be able to work directly with brands that align with the causes we support. We see promising signs in advertising broadly that suggest brands are making more of an effort to make sure they have a positive impact on the world.

We publish our quarterly financial values online. The number is calculated based on the donations but because of the way in which our ad provider works, we cannot provide immediate monetary value. There is a delayed payment method. Also, users can choose what charity they want to donate to. There is for example Tab for Trees. Tab for Trees shows users the amount of trees their tabs have raised enough money to plant.

Of course we are publicly displaying the donations also for marketing reasons. We know that trust needs to be earned, especially by companies claiming to donate to charity. This is just one way of helping our users feel confident that we're sending the money where we say we are. One strategy we are currently planning has to do with group impact. Meaning users can form groups and try to reach certain donation goals together. Like this they could work towards larger goals in teams.

There are some partners we have been working with since the beginning, those are still partners of ours at the moment. Other then that we decide as the need arrives. After the supreme court decision on abortion laws for example, we donated to organizations related to the issue of reproductive health. Another decision factor are current crisis, at the moment we donate to organizations supporting Ukraine for example. And another important factor is of course user feedback. We always keep the organizations proposed by users in mind. And of course there are some classifications the organizations have to fulfill. Such as that no money goes to the government and other more formal factors.

Yes, another project currently in use is Search for a Cause. This project is in partnership with Yahoo, where everytime a user searches, they will raise money for non-profits. It uses the Yahoo search engine and includes a few search ads at the top of the results which raise the money we use to support non-profits. Just like Tab for a Cause, Search for a Cause allows users to raise money for charity by doing something they were already doing.

Although our team is small, marketing means everything for us: YouTube, Facebook Ads, TikTok and all other channels. What we are trying to do is to work with individual creators more then with platforms. At the moment we are for example phasing out of paid ads of Facebook and only use organic search, to work directly with creators. Our goal is to pay people, not platforms.

For example, if we were to market an extension dedicated to supporting the LGBTQ+ community, we would aim to work together with LGTBQ+ creators. This kind of targeted individual expansion is more effective for our cause than ad targeting is. Simply because ads don’t always work. We are therefore choosing creators based on the potential interest of their audience in our causes. This also allows us to support different communities in many different ways. Not only would we be donating to organizations that support the community, but we'd also be supporting individuals in the community directly.

We tried out different things and are always adjusting our strategies. Content wise, some of what worked best for us on TikTok were videos that raise money themselves. Like the Watch To Donate principle, they were pretty successful. For example, content such as “for every x amount of likes we plant one tree” worked out well. And people also liked videos of a set up fake rivalry between me and my boss at Tab for a Cause because it gave them something to be excited about with a goal to achieve.

It seems like people need immediately entertaining content. A lot of brands are able to utilize this phenomenon more than we are, they can be a bit more wild on social media. We at Tab for a Cause choose not to do this kind of marketing because the causes we're raising money to support can be very serious and we don't want to make jokes about them.

It sounds that simple, all you have to do is like this video and we will do something good, but people are not doing it. This worked for a while but it seems that making the world a better place used to be a trendy topic. People are less exited by it now, what we see is that they are losing interest. For this reason, we tried out a new approach of creating more educational content. We educate people about the causes that we fight for. Mostly those are very talkative videos that do not require too much attention. But they are very time intensive to create. And also, those videos were more difficult to break through the algorithm with.

Another good way is to go for relatability. If everyone knows the problem, this will raise attention. Things like hey, do you have too many open tabs on your computer? work well as almost everyone knows this problem.

A lot of both branded and personal content on social media is not authentic, as it does not reflect real consumer interest but rather marketing initiatives. I think that we might have to redefine what authenticity means. We are trying to create content not necessarily about what our organization is doing, but more about making our company visible and show who we are, that we exist. We want to create content that people will enjoy, relate to, and connect with and in exchange, hope that they're interested in learning more about us.

Yup! Brands are always looking to get in front of the right audience at the right time. We provide a way for them to reach an audience that cares about social impact in a unique environment (the new tab page).  The video provider we work with knows what we are doing and is fine with it.

There are similarities and differences, which might also bring different strategies. There is a certain expectation of what corporate TikTok accounts have to look like, there is for example a completely different filming style. With my own account I am not selling anything and I am also not asking people to download a product. It is just about me, my own comedy and jokes. It is just me, I am the product. But I would not want to be a fulltime content creator. I want to do whatever I do and not be entirely depended on the money raised through this.

Being in connection with other organizations has been difficult for us. We are not very connected, the groups of this sphere. Not because there is a lack of interest, it just doesn’t naturally happen. We are running a company on three people right now and there is only so many hours in the day. Also, there is a sense of competition, even if we all work towards the same goal. Some users might say I would love to support Tab for a Cause but I am using Ecosia. Even if we actually allow to uses this exact search engine within our extension. But we don’t know if Ecosia is reacting in the same way.

Watch To Donate knew about Tab for a Cause and was launching their family fund at that time. They reached out to us and made videos that promoted our company in order to raise money for this family fund.

One important value for us is to only spend money on marketing, if the organization is absolutely sure that it will bring back more money for charity. This is the same for every topic, the net good should always outweigh the net bad.

Our main product is our Watch To Donate product, which is a skippable programmatic video.

We work by wrapping existing creative assets in our unique wrapper, distributing them into premium pre-roll slots, and then once a viewer has watched past a certain point, they unlock a charity donation that is funded by the advertiser.

Our brand partners can choose 1-3 charities to support through their advertising campaign, and then the viewer gets to select which charity they would like to donate to.

Our goal is to always donate around 50%. If we secure a deal for £50,000, then £25,000 would be donated across the charities that have been chosen.

Visibility and accountability.

Through our wrappers, viewers can see the companies’ impact through that particular campaign from what charities they’ve supported and how much has been donated easily through our Impact Hub which is linked to each ad.

It helps remove the scepticism of what a brand says they’ll do, and what they’re actually doing.

Typically, brands will have a pre-existing partnership with a charity that will receive its benefit, or they may have a particular campaign that is leaned towards certain charities i.e. if their campaign is centered around an LGBTQIA+ focus, they would then pick LGBTQIA+ charities to benefit.

They have the input here however if they do ask for recommendations, we are able to highlight relevant charities for them if required.

Great question!

We’ve partnered with a company called SoGive which does a background check into charities to see which charities have the highest impact value (i.e. the biggest impact per $1) and then our impact manager will go through onboarding charities. This process is what ultimately defines if the charity is legitimate.

In terms of the brand participating in greenwashing, we have an ethical review process. If we have a point of concern, for example the recent World Cup, a company-wide document is shared for the team to add any resources around it that are for / against the campaign. Once all the evidence has been collected, this is then reviewed by a committee consisting of our impact manager and the leadership team who will make the final decision.

There’s a grey area, which is why we have the review process because it’s important to look at the full picture. At the end of the day, our mission is to redirect some of the ad revenue spent and redistribute that to good causes.

Once again, this is difficult to define as they may also do things we do agree with i.e. Unilever has committed to net zero through an impressive Climate Transition Action plan. They know that there are issues, but they are on a journey to change that. Good-Loop wants to help brands in that process to show how even their digital advertising can be more responsible.

As Marketers, this is changing all the time through new platforms and opportunities. Adaptability is key.

The way we keep on top of this is brand studies. For example, 70% of respondents in a recent study said that Good-Loop wrappers were more likely to encourage them to fully view the ad, feel positively about the brand we’re working with and thought it was a great way of raising money.

This foundation will always be at our core. We may change the format, or how we define our target audience, but our products will always be driven at redistributing a decent % of ad revenue to charities. That won’t change.

Yes, it’s currently in the user-testing phase but we are. The idea behind it is by displaying a small banner ad at the bottom of each new tab, every time the user opens a tab, they unlock a microdonation for your chosen charity.

We are, we have similar products. However, they seem to be more focused marketing B2C, whereas our focus for collaborations is with charities themselves.

We have our Green Ad Tag that allows us to measure the carbon footprint of an ad campaign.

Our Green Media Technology simplifies the data into a dashboard that allows agencies and brands to measure their current campaigns, and find out how they can reduce their impact for their future campaigns. Whether it’s changing the time of day the campaign is shown, or through targeting particular devices, this educational aspect to our product is fundamental.

Primarily, a lack of knowledge around the impact that an advertising campaign can have.

Last year, we commissioned a study and found that 70% of U.K. media agency marketers believe there are not enough sustainability education/training programmes to give marketers the skills and confidence to effectively understand and reduce the impact digital marketing has on the environment.

Once marketers truly understand their impact and how to reduce it, then there will be a shift towards a standardisation of decarbonisation across the advertising industry. It’s about the education around the topic that is mostly holding us back.

I believe that there is too little connection between the topic of data and sustainability at the moment. People tend to believe that the internet is something which is not using energy or at least not too much, but this is not true. Streaming music and online shopping for example have a high impact on the environment and have been highly promoted by companies all over the world within the last couple of years.

It is our intention to communicate the impact of our website. And above all we intend to make people aware of the infrastructure that stands behind our website. This is for example, why we include a solar battery meter that is indicating how much solar power is left until our website goes offline. Another element in use is the page size calculator. With all these measures we are trying to make people aware of the weight of websites and the fact that not every website is equally problematic. Low Tech Magazine also has – what some people might call radical ideas – on environmental issues. We also want to be consistent within our message and such a website helps us with this.

Yes, it is making a difference. We received a lot of attention since our website has gone online four years ago. Other people started doing low energy websites and they recognized that they could achieve something through more sustainable web design. But of course, if you zoom out – and this with any topic, not only websites and the internet – it does not seem to have a big impact and one might quickly get depressed. But if you think like that, you stop doing anything, so you have to focus on the positive side.

What I see especially critical though are platforms such as TikTok, which are aiming at a very young audience. This makes young people used to the internet as being an endless function that is always available.

Oh, many things are possible. Low Tech Magazine decided on a design which reflects the effects of low energy in a way that is very visible to the user. But this is also due to our communication strategy. We want to make people aware of this topic, this is a clear decision but not obligatory for creating low tech content.

The problem is that we have very high resolutions today, exaggerated resolutions. People use those kind of resolutions without thinking about it. But we would only see the difference on a cinema screen, not on our laptops or mobile devices. Let me give you an example: During the COVID-19 pandemic Netflix lowered the resolution of their videos because the internet was about to be overloaded and crash. And nobody noticed that. You would only see the difference in cinema, not at home on your small screen. And this is the case with many other technologies, not only videos. They are extremely loaded and full of thousands of pixels which we would not need.

Our Low Tech Magazine Website is a pioneer work and unfortunately not very easy to replicate. I was not able to build the website by myself but I put it together with a whole team, with people who know how to set up servers. This makes me depended on the web designers if I want to change or adapt things. Before this website I could simply do this in an online editor, now regenerating the website needs a whole team.

What would be needed in order for everyone to be able to build such websites is a similar tool to WordPress for static websites. Everybody could use it. This would be perfectly possible but is not available yet. Static site generators use up way less energy than dynamic ones. This used to be the internet standard in the 1990s.

It is true, solar power creates limits and the design has to consider these limits. You could not run a high resolution WordPress website on our servers. But what is much more important than switching to renewable energy sources is to reduce our energy consumption in general and to create light weight websites. And of course we should not only reduce the energy in this field, but in every area of life. We tend to only talk about green energy but hardly ever about reducing our energy consumption in general. And if you work with such resources, you have to accept that they are not always available. There are some periods of the year, when they aren’t. But for us those are on average 20 days a year and the batteries we use work for about 3-4 years.

And low resolution websites are very user friendly. Because of the low resolution it only takes a few seconds to load the whole website, everything is there immediately. Even though the website is not designed for speed but low energy use in the first place. Articles with 20-30 images load within seconds. Especially, if you do not use cookies and advertising – which is a lot more user friendly and convenient.

At the moment the internet is not a fun place anymore. There are popups everywhere as well as tracking. And especially that, the tracking behind all the sites, uses a lot of energy. Which is a selling argument today but if you have a good product and really focus on quality, you would not have to care about all the user data and information collected through this background tracking.

And there are actually quite a lot of activists on the internet. Most of them are concerned about data security and about who is owning the networks. Environmental issues are a big topic that too little people think about at the moment when it comes to the internet. I think that these activists will have to work together.

The most bizarre thing that came to my mind was that Facebook takes $117 billion in ad revenue. So, essentially, they're getting all that money from advertisers, but they're only delivering them a 0.4% attention engagement rate. Ads on Facebook are not even working. The vulnerability of that economic model is significant because they're getting all their money from stakeholders that aren't getting the return they need anyway.

Is it possible to get someone's full attention but leave them feeling valued, loved, and rewarded? If we can get people's attention in a way that makes them feel loved and valued and get money to make massive donations to charities, then we can change the world and redirect that $100 billion going to Facebook back to people on the planet. Simultaneously, it's time to ask: how do we create social media that is free from hate? Good for the earth inspires people and unites us all to solve the world's biggest problems. Thus why we curated our app around the idea of  8 minutes of attention a day because we want our users to go out and run in the forest and hug their friends and tell someone they love them. We don't want to suck away people's lives and attention. We want to give back and reconnect.

Essentially I've spent a lifetime of 35 years in media and technology. Before this, I built a company called Standard Media Index close to New York.  There, I saw so much money going to NBC Discovery, Disney, and TV networks, and surely, they were all excellent. But can you imagine, over the last 12 years, we observed all of this money going to Facebook and Facebook only? The crazy thing is, as I said, $117 billion last year went to them, and only a 0.4% engagement rate on those ads, meaning that it's not even working. At the same time, I started to see very early how they were fuelling climate misinformation. That is somehow how I became obsessed with this topic and with ways to find solutions. Additionally, there was a catalyst moment when I saw that the Federal Reserve came out with a statistic, saying 40% of all Americans cannot find $400 in an emergency. I believe that since covid, that's nearly 80%. So, essentially, we've got 200 million Americans on the verge of that poverty line. With our platform, we tried to answer two questions. First, is it possible to deliver a digital ad in a transformational way that values someone for 2 minutes a day? And is it possible to build social media that's free from hate, both on moderation, reporting, infrastructure, and zero tolerance? Once these questions were drafted, we spent years working out how to do that.

We share 5% of all our revenue with carbon offset projects and charities. Every time you watch an ad, money goes into your wallet that you can then pay to charities. We're launching a fully updated version at the end of the 25th of January. We're lucky enough to have a lot of big talent who are all part of it saying This is our new social home where we come together and bring "the good". They are creators, footballers, artists, actors, musicians, TV networks, and shows. The Friends Feed is a pure friend feed, meaning there won't be any algorithms, no ads, and it will be completely private. If I feel like watching an ad, any time I'm watching it, I tap on that little present on the app and then collect the money. In this process, between $0.08, and $0.01 will be donated. Then, the money goes into my wallet and I can pay it forward to a charity, or I can use it to pay my Spotify, my Discovery Plus or HBO subscription, and my mobile bill, etc.

The goal is that everyone should be able to pay 10% forward to a charity and pay for their Spotify or TV subscriptions. Essentially, for every dollar that comes in, 50% goes to people, 5% to charity and climate solutions, and 5% to a creative fund. Additionally, people can pay it forward to charities. So far, 54% of people forwarded it to charities. And hopefully, in the future, we will solve the world's biggest problems. Our mission is to redirect that $1,000,000,000 going to Facebook debt to people on the planet.

Yes, and we do that through big media partnerships. We have big media partnerships in the US with Spotify for example. We've got lots of football players and everyone coming on board, and then on the other side, we've built our version of Facebook ad manager, our ad engine. We launched it in Australia three months ago, and it's being appreciated because the advertisers are getting better results. It's transformational for the ad sector. Users are watching the ads because they feel valued and they can pay their little bills. If I can pay my Spotify subscription and make donations through this habit of watching an ad, it seems pretty sweet, isn't it? Then think about what could happen if we had 20 million people doing this. In Australia, for example, people who just watch for 2 minutes of ads a day generating 7 million go to Climate Solutions every month. If every Australian downloads We are 8, and watches just 3 minutes a day, $378 million will be shared with PayPal every month.

We're fighting against the broken old Silicon Valley,  Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok. We're trying to make a positive impact in the world because when we come together as human beings, we really can change the world and it's easier and more fun than you could imagine.

By the end of June. We're opening it up to a lot of countries, and then launching in the app ad model. We're launching all the social features everywhere, and we're launching the ad model in 13 markets next year.  France, Germany, Spain, the US, Canada, India, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand have just launched.

We're already seeing gains. We already have nearly a million people in the UK and we need a relatively low number. So our goal for 2023 is to get 80 million people on board. We have developed great media partnerships which will bring their best content. You know, if it was solely transactional, people wouldn't do it. But if we have Ferdinand or Marcus Rashford or Robbie Williams who are initiating a move and saying "check out my latest videos", more people will join. We've been adding elements to our product experience for the last year to just make it stickier and stickier. This has been eight years and $36 million of investment and blood, sweat, and tears 12 hours a day of work obsessively. My biggest fear was if we do not do this, who would? We needed to do it, to drive the change. We all became completely obsessed with this.

I feel grateful that I had this background. I built my first company at 21, so I've got 35 years of building media and technology businesses. I think the reality is the big behemoths combined with the tech patriarchy and the frameworks for funding do not enable any alternatives to come to the fore. I had to fund 9 million of this before selling a semi anyway, so I had to borrow $5 million at one point which was horrifically painful. The funding isn't there for diverse and female leaders to come up with alternatives. Anything in the media tech space that does not support Google, Facebook, or Amazon will not be appreciated. On top of that, we realized, after spending years with behavioral scientists, that only about 12% of people will engage in such actions or platforms. The reality is, though, if you want to drive collective behavior, there has to be something in it for people individually and something for the planet but also all the dynamics of fame that goes with that. But raising money for such a project was hard. The industry's sexist and everyone believes that the big behemoths are going to win anyway. And let me tell you right now, they're not because advertisers want an alternative. People want an alternative. Creators want an alternative. And for our planet, if we don't address these problems collectively, we've got six years until the damage is irreversible. So we've got destiny on our side, I reckon, fabulous women. We're going to change this.

Well, let me say a little a few very general things. First of all, I think it's still true what I wrote 25 years ago or so: people get on the Internet and now social media especially because they want attention. Human beings need attention. Some people, as I emphasized in that piece that you read, want it more than others at times much more; at times from the whole world. The former President of the US, Donald Trump, is a very good example: For years he had visitors pose against a wall in his office covered with magazine covers featuring his picture because relished attention to himself so much. As President, and since, he was constantly Tweeting to an audience of many millions. And another person who seems to be in that category is Elon Musk, who recently bought the social media site Twitter.

So a way to gauge social media, it seems to me, from the perspective of the people who get on it, is to a considerable extent: "How do I get attention?", "How do I get people noticing what I say?", "Am I getting attention even if I'm only commenting or ‘liking’ or something like that?", "Are people noticing me?". Of course, when I wrote that 1997 article, there were no social media or smart phones yet. But those two innovations have simply widened the possibility and offered new avenues for getting attention. So as things stand now in the world, there are billions of people who have some sort of smartphone or something like that and who are on social media. Unlike older media such as newspapers or radio or movies or books (or anything of that sort) there are usually no intermediates such as editors, producers, publishers and other gatekeepers, as in the not-so-distant past who could block you or evaluate your contribution before it can get to any audience.

So you get attention pretty immediately if you can gather any other people who are somehow interested in what you say or do, which inflames the desire to do things that will get you attention, whether that’s dancing the right dance on TikTok in a brilliant way, or putting your music out, or being angry or nasty or saying complete nonsense or utter lies in a significant-sounding way.

To me, what social media does, or did at its origin, has nothing to do with advertising. If you look at how the present such media started, they didn't even have substantial advertising at first. But obviously, one soon realizes that all social media maintenance costs money. One way to start is by getting investors, but eventually they demand profits. Advertising has been the main way to subsidize all the needed computers, connections, and other costs.

Still, it seems to me that people don't usually want to give up their attention that easily to would-be advertisers unless it's just something that interests them for a reason, which sets up a dynamic that, you know, most of the ads that you see are somehow supposedly geared to what your desires are. Supposedly, the various sites such as Facebook and Google collect vast amounts of data on every user so that they can determine each user’s unconscious desires. But they still don’t really don't know your desires, so they make wild guesses. Very often, these are very far from accurate. For instance, I have a subscription to the New York Times online, and I very often see - for some reason that seems utterly bizarre to me - the images of very high-priced women’s clothes that I have zero interest in purchasing or buying or doing anything with. Often, to my further shock, the article in which the ad shows up is full of horrifying photos of terrible occurrences, which hardly seems the place to interest anyone in luxurious glamor. I don't know how they got that idea. The result, I think, is basically that people want to skip over the ads if they can. They find them more or less annoying, hardly a fit object of their attention..

Now, I guess when we're talking about Watch To Donate, which works more on the principle that, and correct me if I'm wrong, people would rather watch something from which they think some good will ultimately come. It fully makes sense, except that if you don't really want that ad, but you're just doing it for some ulterior motive, you are wasting your attention.

There has been a long history of people figuring out ways to get attention. I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember We Are the World which was a series of concerts in the eighties and nineties with numerous groups of very well-known rock and such musicians and singers. They were trying to direct money to various good causes such as fighting starvation in Africa so people would pay and they would watch them on TV, which makes some sense because of course very often you have to pay money to pay attention, such as to buy tickets when you go to a concert, or just to listen on Spotify or whatever it might be now. But the idea you are referring to is that one should be paid for one’s attention. That is not how attention normally works. You pay money to pay attention, usually, not the reverse.

The second problem that I observe in this strategy is that, at the end of the day, the advertisers want you to buy the product. If you don't buy their product, they're wasting their money, and they will eventually stop. So people who are on that "watch to donate" have to be willing to buy the products that they see advertised, at a fair price. And as you know, advertising takes up about 10% of the world monetary economy. So, roughly speaking, you're paying 10% just for the ads. So I don't consider that a very viable model for the reason that people who can afford to donate don't need to go through that process. In general, those who cannot afford to donate can't afford to buy the products. So there is a tendency that you end up in a situation where it just isn't going to work out financially.

Now, for We Are 8, I'm not sure I feel sufficiently familiar with it to comment, but basically, it's a good idea if there's a way to actualize it, we are that is in a way that will function. But behind the idea of doing only good things means there has to be some sort of motivation. I mean, it would be very good if people were initially and continually excited by people doing good, but it's much more complex than that. Additionally, I don't know why it would have to be limited to 8 minutes in that sense. At the moment, I'm trying to write a book about the Internet and the human future. One of the things I believe people have to learn to do is to pay attention to people who find it hard to express themselves or find it hard to say what it is that moves them and that they care about because those people also need and want attention but often they don't get it. They can then be pulled in very bad directions by those who seem to give them attention. So that's something involving learning and deciding to use the Internet for good in a way that in a way strains against our normal desires to give attention only to what's interesting and exciting.

Let me add that having looked again carefully at the WeAre8 website, I still think it is based on an advertising model that I question, partly for the reasons I stated before. How much can "doing good" be financed by urging viewers to buy beer or shoes that are quite possibly produced under exploitative conditions? Either most participants will ignore the ads, or following them would undercut any good that they might want to do.

It’s, I think, a great challenge that we face, and I'm a little dubious because, well, first of all, as you may know, I don't know if any of you were interested in Twitter; for some reason I've gotten very interested in it, and Twitter is a mostly verbal means, mostly through writing, and as you may know, and a lot of which just amounts to throwing insults. With the current changes, I don't know whether Twitter will survive, but you also have to think about the attention it creates and the fact that it also runs on ads. To get away from that model, which was politically and economically not so viable anymore, many former Twitter users have gone on something called Mastodon. I haven't quite managed at age 80 to figure out how to get on it, but I am sure I will. The point is, it's already trying to be a lot like what it seems We Are 8 is, namely, actually in this case, a probably non-advertising-based system of kind of volunteer protocols using open source kinds of basic programming to stay on the air or stay on the Internet.

So the idea is to lower the costs very substantially. I think it's going to be hard to do that now, but it won't be hard in the future, probably, because all the costs connected with computing go down over time. My strong guess is that just showing pictures or videos and a lot of words and links to other sources the way something like Twitter does will get cheaper and cheaper. And so eventually it will be a system that people can simply get on voluntarily without ads and it will be run with very little overhead. So to me, at present, partly because of what I said in my experience with Twitter, Mastodon seems more viable than the other options we discussed before.

I believe the actual economy of attention is separate from the economy of money.

People, for example, within families or groups or communities, give things to each other and take care of one another in all sorts of ways that involve paying attention but that don't have anything to do with money. And basically, the Internet extends that to the whole world. So at this point, money is needed for some things, and the standard would-be capitalist or venture capitalist is searching for the next great investment opportunity. But I think it is misleading to think that what is going to attract people to pay money would be a chance to get attention or their ability to pay attention to what interests them most. Now, at this point, as you may know, considerable attention goes outside social media to things like streaming music or movies or videos or whatever.

And that's a different model at this point. It's a paid model. Social media are more like being at a party in a certain way. If you're at a party, I guess people have food and drinks or something like that, someone has hosted them or whatever. But what really makes it a party is the way attention gets paid to one another. People talk and listen to one another and maybe dance or whatever they do communally without anybody getting rich from that. Now you can envisage at least one model of the future of the Internet— ignoring political issues and things of that nature—as a big party. That's sort of how I view Twitter when I get on it. It's like being at a party. Admittedly, people are not visually seeing one another, but you have little tidbits of conversation. It's like you're moving around to different groups and listening in and perhaps adding your words to particular conversations or whatever.

Sometimes, you mutually generate ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise. There’s no reason that the Internet including social media without advertising could not exist as long as it's affordable. That comes from easily available resources. But that counters the assumption that "obviously" the Internet of the future will will need more and more and more technology and therefore it will offer endless investment opportunities.

The typical Internet company wants to keep on being highly profitable, and that requires making huge monetary investments. Should that not be necessary, many competitors will be successful at entering the field, which would drive down profits—eventually to nothing. But huge new investments have to provide something essential for paying or getting attention. That’s, for instance, what Facebook wants with the Metaverse; Zuckerberg assumes the only way to keep going is to somehow go to three dimensions and to all sorts of senses of virtual reality and things like that. I think that most people don't need that degree of verisimilitude to pay or exchange attention. It seems to me we humans don’t even basically use binocular vision that much, and binocular vision is the basis of the headsets used for "virtual reality".

Let me put this in a little context. Three-dimensional movies involving different views for each eye have been around since I was eight or nine, and I guess I was very excited to go see them when I was that age. At the time, you put on a very cheap set of glasses with a different colored lens for each eye. But I saw two or three such movies and that was enough. I think everyone else had a similar experience—just a novelty the newness of which quickly wore off. Such attempts came and they disappeared and they came back and they disappeared over and over, every few years. And that's been the history of them ever since. We don’t normally need the experience of binocular vision to experience the three dimensionality of the spatial world. We are descendants of so-called old-world monkeys who needed binocular vision for their life in trees, and we inherited that capacity without really needing it very much.

So all that huge technology that Facebook is trying to do is a waste of effort.

In my view, there isn't going to be a "Web 3.0" in that sense, and I don't think there will be one in terms of blockchains, either ,which other people predict. For example, somebody came to my house the other day with his truck to see something of mine that he was proposing to fix. His truck was 50 years old, yet it still works perfectly well. He doesn't need to get a new one, even though a new one would have many new features. The point is none of those possible new features are really needed for a truck to perform its basic functions of moving things around at typical traffic speeds. I see the future of the Internet in much the same way. It's reached maturity.

That's doesn’t rule out new features, but how necessary will they be? You know, if I look at the cars built in 1920, many things have changed. Automatic gearshifts, power steering, air conditioning, seatbelts. And you could go on with an enormous list, but it hasn't changed the basic way that they move around or that people get certain capacities from the cars, because that has stayed the same. And I think that's the future of the Internet, that it has reached maturity in a certain way. That's not true in terms of details, but I think it is true in terms of how we connect to it for the most part. And so looking at new social media sites that have one or another feature seems to be beside the point, unless the feature is we can operate really with very few ads or no ads or we will not give you ads unless you are interested in something, etc. So that's what I think the future is.

I think that's a huge question. I don't believe I have all the answers, but maybe it won't happen. But I think it's sort of the same way that people get interested in, let's say, stopping a particular war. When I was in college, students in large numbers were going down to the southern part of the United States to try to help the Civil Rights movement started by Black Americans. I assume you have at least heard about that. Let's say it took a lot of sense of purpose. It took a lot of sense of moral necessity. It took a lot of understanding that there was this huge inequality and trying to do something about it. And so I think, you know, that's a very vague outline of what is needed.

There has to be, I would say, some sort of movement for that, some sort of campaign or something else to try to say to people, "this is what you ought to be doing". And you could be doing that for example, I don't know, about 8 minutes a day or whatever, but it is if you do it for 3 hours a week, let's say you try to focus your attention on people who need it but aren't getting it. I admit, I personally find that hard to do. You have to focus on hearing and understanding someone who is not particularly articulate or interesting, for instance. How to do that is not obvious nor easy. Still, most people, as they live in families, for instance, have some experience of doing that, that you pay attention to people who perhaps are not very good at getting attention, but who feel they deserve it.

About two years ago there was an article about me in the New York Times, and the title of it was essentially, I have spoken to the Cassandra of the Internet age. (Cassandra was of course the Trojan princess in The Illiad who prophesied doom for her country.) So my optimism is certainly tinged with pessimism. I have a great deal of pessimism, but I also feel that pessimism grows out of some feeling of what a hopeful possibility could be, and as I said, we have to work towards that. It's like, you know when if I go back again to the example of the civil rights era in this country, one of the things that happened was television.

We began to have national television. And so suddenly people in the North saw the horrible way Blacks in the South were treated, which had gone on for a century or very close to a century. And they were so struck by that that they—you know, at least a small fraction of people, but enough to make a big difference— went to the South or voted in a certain way or did something else to help change that terrible treatment, purely because they now saw it and they could now understand it. So I think there's a similar dynamic. I mean, it's very much more complicated because as you know, as you spoke of surveillance capitalism, there's also surveillance autocracy that is quite severe in terms of the Internet itself. It's a question of whether people begin to see it and even feel it in their own lives, they can perhaps work against it.

As you may know, also in my country, the US, the Supreme Court just a few months ago overturned the right to abortion, and that was a horrible reminder to a significant number of young people that a very serious right was in jeopardy. As a result, they went and voted. I mean, it's not a very huge thing, but many people did more than vote. They campaigned, for instance. And so that even states which have been viewed as quite right-wing like Kansas, which has voted solidly Republican for a century, changed course. The Republican majority in the Kansas legislature had tried to get a vote by the people to prevent abortion, and that was lost because primarily women, but also men, campaigned door to door, so to say. Hopefully, people will rise to the occasion without it having to go to the level of what's going on in Ukraine, for instance.

I think I’ve already partially answered that. You can think of it as an investment opportunity, which is why people in Silicon Valley are so interested. They want to figure out what's the next big investment opportunity related to the Internet. These people are sure there is one. They present us with two alternatives, each of which its supporters refer to as Web 3.0. One is the blockchain. As far as I can figure out, there may be some usefulness to the basic idea of a blockchain in certain circumstances, which is a distributed network of, essentially computers that all verify that a certain thing has happened. But the idea of using that for money, for instance, seems to me to be just silly. I'm certainly not alone in that view.

Plenty of people in Silicon Valley are libertarians, which supposedly should mean they are against anything like autocracy. However, they themselves are would-be autocrats in the sense that they believe they should be able to do whatever they want with their money including controlling the rest of humanity.

The other vision of Web 3.0 is the Metaverse idea. It sounds to me very nice for a party for a five-year-old, but it's not useful for much, really. Basically, what you have is Zuckerberg, who is a technocrat, surrounded by all these very limited people, a technocratic individual who is seeking a new technology which a lot of money can be thrown into and therefore which will help him keep what are essentially monopolies.

I think Mastodon is an excellent example of that. Maybe We Are 8 could also be similar but what is needed is a network effect. On Facebook, for example, if all your friends are on Facebook, you want to be on Facebook and not on We Are 8 because virtually nobody you know is on there. The question is whether something like Mastodon, which supposedly can interconnect many little social media running on different platforms, can work.

I don't see in principle why not, but you know, it depends again on the costs of the basic superstructure that has to be built. And if it's built in a decentralized way, the key thing is having the right software and not so much having a very elaborate, huge set of hardware that everything is run from a few centers the way Facebook is. That depends on this idea that the technology keeps lowering the cost of a single bit or a byte or a flop or whatever.

At the same time, you only need a certain number of flops or bytes. For example, it would be nice if I saw you all in higher resolution or if you saw me in higher resolution. Right at this moment I see myself much more vividly than I see any of you through our connection, but it's not necessary for our conversation for me to see you better. I mean, even at this scale, I see plenty. I could see your expressions. I can see where your eyes are pointing and everything like that. I think most people don't need everything that might be desirable. At a certain point, you know, there's a limit to how much we can see. Our eyes are not getting stronger and stronger and stronger. We don't need infinitely high resolution.  You know, I live very close to Silicon Valley, in Berkeley, where housing prices go up hugely because of Silicon Valley.

But that's not necessarily going to be the future of the world. You know, this is they just think, what's the next big thing to invest in terms of more technology? At a certain point, they're missing the boat. Many of the leaders in Silicon Valley think of some sort of Trans-human future and also of settling a colony on Mars. Well, to me, it's equally crazy to imagine never-ending profit growth from the Internet and to think of going to Mars and settling there. What do we need that for? Nothing is going to change the fundamental thing about Earth, which is the only planet we know of that gave birth to humanity or anything like it. No.

Is Mars ever going to be a nice place to live? Well, not a lot of people are living in Antarctica at present. And Mars is a lot worse. It has no animals, no plants, no trees, you know, no art, no anything. What's the point of going there? And from the point of view of the attention economy, if you're on Mars, you can't conduct a conversation with anyone on Earth; you just can't because of the delays. The round trip for any single exchange is half an hour or more, possibly considerably more. So basically, these Silicon Valley technologist-capitalists tend to have infantile imaginations and they only got there because they made the right investments at a certain time and that made them richer and then they made more, and so forth. It is like a gold rush.

If you think of the 19th century, what got people aside from the Native Americans to California in the first place was gold being discovered in 1848 or 49. Huge numbers of people came, but the gold petered out. There was no more gold worth mining at a certain point, and they had to start farms, open restaurants or do other things. They had to change completely what they did in their lives. And I see an analogy. Silicon Valley will not necessarily go on forever. New technologies in the form of what I call attention technologies will not be necessary in, you know, hugely more expensive varieties. iPhone 100 will not be that different from iPhone 12, so to speak. We shouldn't necessarily think that these things can go on forever and get better and better and better in some significant way.

I don't have any very strong opinions about that sort of thing. I think if you're able to keep exploiting those trends, it's great. I don't know that I can say anything very profound or even interesting about it. But it does seem to me if you can divert people so that they get a sense of they're doing something good for the world while they're watching them, that's excellent and I don't see anything wrong with it. I think the question is, can it grow or does it need to grow? As with the example I gave of We Are the World, there are plenty of artists and musicians and so forth who are quite ready to help support good causes, and there always have been. This is just another way to do it, and that's a wonderful thing. It's more up-to-date than those other ways. I think this basic model is a good one. If it depends on people looking at ads, that's more questionable to me.

I don't know whether right now you're being paid to watch me or something like that, but I'm not being paid to do this. Nobody's is paid except in attention. It is true that if you pay somebody attention, you're also very often willing to pay them money. That's the general way it goes, not the other way around, where you pay money to get attention, but you pay attention because if you get attention, you can get money. That's certainly true. One way to put it is there are many, many more attention transactions that take place in the world today than there are monetary transactions or even material goods transactions of any sort.

I would argue also there's an attention economy in the whole world that has money as a part of this. But we think about it backward in the wrong way. One of the brilliant things Facebook was the first to do was to set up the like button and to let people know how many friends everybody they befriend has. On Twitter, it's called followers. You can check and see how you're doing in terms of followers and you can check and see how many likes you have got for something you say, and so can others.

Some of the attention that we pay in this world goes to people who cannot possibly use it for any material purpose because they're dead. If you read a book by somebody who died 20 years ago, they're still influencing you. If you read Plato or Aristotle or somebody like that, for example, even in a language such as English, French, or German, which didn’t even come into existence until well over a thousand years after they died, they influence you, but of course they can get nothing material from you.

Attention has always been something of value to people. That includes the value of imagining that you will still get attention in people’s memories or in their looking up what you did or said well after you are dead. In that way you live on in their minds. Now with the Internet, you can conceivably get so much more attention than used to be possible. If you choose to monetize it, you can possibly do that at any point in various ways. Money stands for goods in some complicated way. In the United States, let's say 130 years ago, roughly speaking, over 50% of the people were farmers and they had to be farmers to raise their food or raise something else that they could exchange for food. That has changed. It's now less than 1%. So today’s budgets for food, although they seem large because of inflation or something like that, are much smaller than they used to be in terms of the amount of work required and so forth.

We've moved into a different world, I acknowledge that, but I don't believe that the future of the monetary economy can rely on the attention economy and technologies. Yet the attention economy will continue to grow more important and essential in ordinary lives.

That is certainly true, and the indirect way of doing that will probably continue to involve money and other things. We have about a thousand homeless people here in Berkeley, or maybe more than that. And some of them are very good at getting attention. And then someone gives them money because they're good at getting attention. However, others of the homeless are very bad at getting attention. Somebody has to make an effort to give them enough attention to try to figure out how to help them, which is not easy. They're not out on the streets or easy to spot, often, because they’re not in good shape. But their getting attention is one of the key things that has to happen if their lives are to improve.

Anyway, this has been, you know, a very nice conversation, though I've talked too much perhaps. Consider this a little party. Even though I didn't give you any drinks, cake, or anything, it is.  It was very fun meeting you all.