It's a neat idea, but I'd be interested to see at what rate these redirected visitors actually do anything on the sites they land on. I know that if I click a link and find something unrelated to what I was looking for, I general close the tab pretty immediately.
Amy here, one of the creators. Great point, and there will be some self-reporting necessary here since we obviously don't have access to anyone's Google Analytics. If you have submitted domains through the site, please let us know how it's working for you! The referrer should show as domains4good.org. A/B testing the copy/design of the interstitial page before the redirect is also something we can test in the future to see what encourages people to stick around the longest. Thanks for the comments.
Amy et al, very cool. Would be great if this could be used to really boost SEO for the featured nonprofit's keywords over time. Maybe pull some content keywords from the featured site for link juice and then create archived pages for the previous nonprofits. Like /handup -> http://handup.us ???
Interesting idea, and I agree there's a lot more we could do to better support the social causes on-site vs. just the general ___domain redirects. We created this all in a weekend at the #hack4good hackathon in SF, so what you're seeing now is just the beginning.
Exactly what I was thinking. Anytime I hit a typo ___domain, it's an accident that's occurred while I was in the middle of a task. Trying to get people to stop what they are trying to accomplish and change direction so drastically seems overly difficult - akin to interruptive adverts on Facebook asking me to sign up for a new bank while I'm commenting on what someone had for lunch.
Neat concept but I can't help but wonder whether selling the ___domain and donating the profits to an actual charity wouldn't be a better use of the "funds". Or just not renewing the ___domain and donating that $10 to the charity of your choice in perpetuity...
