We are interested in discussing, responding and hearing your thoughts on the Million Dollar Blog Post idea.

Since we will only be approving comments and trackbacks that include qualifying responses to the Million Dollar Blog Post, we have setup this page to discuss the idea with you.

Take a moment to read our frequently asked questions.

Do you have questions that aren’t answered? Want to discuss if this idea will work? We invite you to discuss here.

Million Dollar Blog Post Frequently Asked Questions

What’s this all about?

We’re trying to get 1,000,000 comments on the Million Dollar Blog Post. Each comment should be a wish for the world — something positive, inspiring, humorous, emotional, authentic.

Gifter.org is about building a huge community of socially-conscious people; showing the world how generous the Internet community can be.

Just leave your wish for the world here and you’ll be making a difference.

For each wish we’re going to get someone to donate $1 to charity. Sponsors donate money to any charity they want.

How do I sponsor wishes?

Please read our Sponsor a Wish page. It’s as easy as making a donation and sending us proof, marked with GIFTER.ORG.

Why would someone donate money to charity so they can sponsor my wish?

Why did advertisers buy a pixel on the million dollar home page? Why is he trying to do it again?

Simple. Because you’re reading this page right now. (No we’re not spying, but we still know you’re reading this right now…)

By expressing your wish, and spending a bit of time reading other wishes, we form a community of readers who are interested in the best wishes for the world. Why wouldn’t that be valuable to a company, a blogger, a podcaster, an advertiser or any member of the Internet community?

This isn’t crazy. We’ve seen similar ideas used to the benefit of one person, or company - why not for the benefit of others?

How will comments be moderated?

We have a team of volunteers who will moderate all wish comments. We’re asking people to only leave one comment. If parents want to put in extra wishes for their children, or along with their children, please feel free. This can be a wonderful family experience of wishing and giving. Everyone is invited to make a wish.

As long as your wish for the world isn’t hateful, offensive or hurtful to the project or the community, it will be accepted. Think positive and take the high road with your wish. Be funny or uplifting. Wish for everyone to laugh once a day while dancing like a child without a care in the world, wish that the billion people who live with a daily diet of malnutrition, hunger and poverty might meet the billion of us who never worry of such things.

We’re not the wish police. But, this is a positive project, and we want your positive wishes. If you wish for your tax collector to disappear, then good luck with that. It really doesn’t get to the spirit of the project and we won’t be accepting the wish.

We don’t want this to be a debate about what should be allowed as a wish, or what is too political, or self serving. In fact we won’t even allow comments that criticize other wishes. This is your Internet Wishing Well. Leave a positive wish and watch a sponsor support a charity. It can be that simple.

In the spirit of openness, we do welcome debate, discussion and questions about the project, and we’ve setup a Discussion Page specifically for that purpose.

How can you help us get more comments?

We hope you’ll help! You can tell your friends, co-workers and family. Let your joke list of email buddies or social networking friends know. Blog about it!

Please don’t start blasting chain letters to everyone in your address book about this. We don’t want this project to be associated with spam or overzealous support.

The great thing about today’s social networks and blog communities is that we all have more friends then we know. If you have a presence on the Web, a page in a community website, a blog, a social news or bookmarking site you use or a list of really good email buddies then please spread the word.

I love this idea, how can I help?

In addition to leaving your wish you can help spread the word. Let your favorite blogger know. Call your community paper and let them know. We aren’t sending out press releases, we need all the help we can get to spread the word.

Please spend some time and read the other wishes. Meet other people who have hope for the world and our future. Take some time this holiday to read funny wishes with your family, bookmark your favorite wish and share it with friends.

Please also visit the sponsors who have given generously to sponsor your wish. This project will not succeed without their generous support.

If you want to learn more about the history of this community project, check out the About page.

And don’t forget you can become a sponsor too.

What if we don’t get enough sponsorship pledges?

We’ll continue to support this project until we receive a million dollars worth of wish pledges. We need the communities support in making sure our sponsors see value in being part of this project. The more people spread the word, the more media that discusses the project, the more wishes we receive all contribute to success of the project.

We do consider even 500 wishes being sponsored a great accomplishment. We’ve already kick started the sponsorships with a few of our own. We have faith that the community will help us make this project popular enough that we should be able to hit this goal pretty quickly.

What if we don’t get enough wish comments?

Once again, it will rely on people spreading the word. If you’ve sponsored a wish, send it to your friends and let them know you’ve made a donation to sponsor their wish. Read the wishes and comment or blog about your favorite ones.

While a million comments might seem like a lot, with the size and speed at which the Internet community can spread news we think we should be able to interest at least a million people to come leave a wish.

What happens after we reach a million dollars?

Soon, we’ll be asking members of the Internet community to volunteer and help us create the MillionDollarBlogPost.com. This project will live on at that site, and we hope to create a variety of content there reflecting the spirit and generosity of the people who participated. One of the first steps will be to create a collage of screenshots of each sponsor’s site/blog.

We will work with volunteers to develop a final site design that captures this project for eternity and gives each sponsor a permanent link to their page, that will be sized in proportion to the size of their gift.

We will also work with volunteers to produce a PDF poster documenting the project which will be freely available for everyone to download.

A million dollars is a lot of money, how do you expect to make this work?

A million dollars on the Internet isn’t a lot money. Call it the long tail of generosity. Call it the economics of abundance. Every day tens of millions of dollars are spent by advertisers looking to promote their site.

In addition, hundreds of millions of dollars are given by individuals to charities every year. Individuals are the largest contributors to charity. There are hundreds of millions of us on the Internet - we can each be a sponsor or leave a wish - together this is an easy goal.

We need 50,000 sponsors of $20 to reach our goal, we need just 200 individuals to show they contributed $5,000. There is a lot of room for everyone to be generous, whether it be $1 or $20,000 thus allowing everyone to play a role.

With the power of large numbers we can make this work.

First make sure to leave a comment and share the idea with a friend. Share the idea with a hundred friends! Help us spread the word, so we get the wish comments.

Second , if you’re planning on giving to charity this holiday season, or if this project and the wishes of your fellow citizens of the planet inspire you, please join us as a sponsor.

If you work for a company involved in Internet communities, or you’re part of a project that relies on the goodwill and generosity of Internet communities, then please ask your employer and co-workers to get involved. Your users are making wishes for the good of the world - support them. Come sponsor a few.

If you own a company ask your employees to make a wish and sponsor $1 for each employee. Think of it as a great way to support your employees. Think of it as a great tax donation. Think of it as advertising money you can write off. We’re open to however you convince yourself or your boss that this is worthwhile. If you can help us find a sponsor or choose to get involved yourself, no matter how big or little - then you’ve helped.

OK, a million dollars isn’t a lot of money. What happens if you get more then $1 million dollars in sponsors?

We have a category for this which is called a “high class problem” :)

The goal of this project to demonstrate and document an act of community generosity. Should it end if we reach our goal but we can still continue? Should we top the million dollar home page by making this the 2 Million Dollar Blog Post?

In the end, we don’t think it matters. A million dollars is a goal. Let’s work on that together. We consider even 500 wishes being sponsored to be 500 individual acts of hope meeting generosity and thus a great success. The size of our combined efforts won’t end up being measured in the amount of money we raise, but by the wishes we make for the world and the dollars that feed those wishes. This occurs for every wish.

As we approach our goal we’ll ask the community how to close the project. There will be a close to the project. This is meant to be an experiment in community generosity. It will not continue forever. I the experiment proves successful we will work with the community to decide whether it should be an annual holiday project or should remain as a one time event. We will move forward to other ideas as there are other social experiments we will be conducting at Gifter.org.

The project will be moved to the MillionDollarBlogPost.com once closed.

What if someone cheats?

We’re operating on the honor system. When you cheat a charity, or a community your karma takes a huge hit - and we wouldn’t want to be standing next to you in a lighting storm.

Each sponsor will be required to post a copy of an image of their donation. We invite charities to review that they actually received these donations.

Participating legitimately is easy, donate online and take your place among the other legitimate sponsors.

Can your blog even handle 1,000,000 comments?

Hmm, good question. According to some research we discovered, the most comments ever left on a blog post might be in the tens of thousands.

As the comments pour in, we may need to ask for help from some of the great community members behind WordPress on how we can keep the wishes going.

We also may need to ask for some help with hosting. This project is being hosted by the Project Ojibwe team and we’re running it on a basic server that we are donating to the project.

If we need help, we’ll ask for it. Hopefully, the community and the importance of this project will help us find volunteers

Can a browser even load a 1,000,000 comments in a page?

Hmmm, also a good question. We fully expect we will have to split the post into manageable pages. We will monitor the usability of the page and the comment, and welcome your suggestions. If we find that splitting the post into 10 or 20 sub posts makes the project more usable or successful then we will do that.

Once again, in the spirit of a volunteer community helping to make this a reality, we may need a volunteer to assist us in managing this process.

Aren’t people just getting credit for donations they were already going to make?

Sure some sponsors may have already been planning to make donations, others we hope are inspired by witnessing the community express their generosity that they make a donation they hadn’t planned on making.

We aren’t motivated by the money. (Easy to admit since we don’t earn any money from any part of this project.) The goal is to document in a social giving experiment how generous the Internet community can be, when we act collectively and support each others projects.

If someone takes the time to acknowledge their donation is related to this social experiment by listing GIFTER.ORG along with the donation, then that is good enough for us.

What other questions do you have?