A click-to-donate site is a website where users can click a button to generate a donation for a charity or cause. The money for the donation comes from advertisers whose banners are displayed each time a user clicks the button. While not directly contributing (though many sites offer additional ways of support), visitors are making a difference in the sense that, had they not visited, no donation would have been given.
In most cases, the donation generated by each user only amounts to a few cents, but the goal is to accumulate enough clicks to add up to a significant amount.
Many charities launched this style of program in the late 1990s. However, the constriction of online advertising spending around 2001 following the dot-com collapse caused many sites to be closed. Yet there are still many which are in operation notably FreeRice, The Hunger Site and Bhookh.com.
Famous quotes containing the word site:
“Its given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)