Tabs For Good lets you raise money for charities just by opening new browser tabs

A new Chrome Extension called Tabs For Good by ad company Good-Loop just launched, and it proposes a pretty interesting situation for Chrome browser users. Install it, open a tab, and see an advertisement. I’m not kidding! A weird proposition, right? Well, that’s not all there is to it.

You see, Tabs For Good generates ad revenue each and every time an ad is displayed. The difference though is that this money goes to a charity of your choice (thanks to the company that generates the ad) so that you can solve real problems in the world like feeding children, cleaning the oceans from plastics, protecting endangered species, supporting women’s education in developing countries and more. You can choose between:

• Save the Children
• WWF
• Un Women
• Unicef
• Hellen Keller Intl
• The Trussell Trust
• Ashoka
• Doctors Without Borders
• Greenpeace

… online advertising isn’t as good as it should be. It’s annoying, it pops up, it auto plays… we block it if we can and resent it if we can’t. But advertisers don’t want to be annoying. In fact, all they really want is to matter to their consumers. So we decided to help advertisers to do something that truly matters.

Good-Loop

In the spare seconds before you type in or load a new website from the New Tab Page, a banner ad is injected at the very bottom of your browser. Because you’re seeing it, someone is being paid. In fact, $586 billion was spent on advertising in 2019 alone, and Tabs for Good sees an opportunity to harness all of that cash and use it towards something other than lining the pockets of corporations that already have meals to eat and diplomas on their walls – my words, not theirs.

Either way, it’s awesome to see someone taking advantage of something that’s been around since 1994. The only real question is whether or not you’d be willing to inconvenience your browsing experience with yet another ad in order to impact the world around you. I spoke about this quite a bit with Nest Renew and even the Google Flights carbon emissions update this week, but power resides with the users of these technologies, and tech giants like Google and Good-Loop are trying their best to harness that power and that’s truly admirable.

As for me, I’m going to install and use Tabs For Good, because the founders Amy Williams and Daniel Winterstein have promised to respect user privacy and data, claiming that no tracking of your online activity will occur. If I can do something to improve the planet for my son and the generations that will follow, I almost feel obligated to do so.

What about you? Does the fact that ad companies rely on third-party cookies or even the more promising and supposedly less intrusive Google FLoC, even if extensions like this one don’t directly track you, bother you? I know that there will be lots of opposition to tools like this, but I think avoiding them entirely is the wrong answer. Let’s get involved with the checks and balances of these companies and not forsake the good that technology can do.

Visit Tabs For Good on the Chrome Web Store