How to Make Everyone Rich -UPDATE

A while back, I noticed that whoever runs Tiny URL had a paypal button. Just a small paypal button with the word “donate” similar to the buttons on thousands of blogs, including this one.

But when I saw the button, I thought: Wow. Thanks to twitter, this site must get hundreds of thousands of hits per week. Imagine if everyone who used this service just donated one dollar. If every user sent one dollar, one time, they site would do very well. If they sent a dollar, once a month, the owners would be incredibly wealthy in very short order.

And that wealth seems justified to me. Someone came up with a program that many find very valuable. Why shouldn’t they reap some reward?

So I decided to have some fun, by trying to make the TinyURL guys rich off of tiny donations. I tweeted the idea and added something like, “let’s all donate $1 to TinyURL right now!”

I thought people might do it, just for fun, and for the experiment. I donated my dollar. But I don’t think anyone else did. At least, no one responded to my tweet, or passed it on, and the TinyURL guys did not suddenly put up a “thanks for the donations” notice or one reading, “off to Rio, you’re on your own, suckers!”

I was disappointed. I still want to try it and see what happens. We all read Instapundit, right? What happens if we all throw a dollar (or, taking paypal fees into account, $1.25 or so) at Glenn Reynolds? How much would he reap of a single days donations? Aren’t you curious? I am!

Call it a “wealth-sharing” scheme that gets revenue into people’s hands, rather painlessly; why not start with bloggers, who put out a lot of content for very little reward? I tell you to throw a dollar at Glenn. He says, “hey, thanks, now let’s all throw a dollar at (probably) Althouse!” Then Ann writes, “Thank you for the windfall. As I am ruthlessly neutral, you may take your pick – throw a dollar at Mickey Kaus or Blogging Heads!”

And so on and so on. People throw dollars at a blogger they like, whether big or small, either the one recommended by their “favorite” blogger, or another one, and afterwards, each “enriched” blogger throws out another name, and it just builds exponentially.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just my naive nature, but I think it could be great fun.

Of course, this means that many of you, wanting to get a share of all that “wealth spreading” will have to begin blogging. And that might upset our president, who dislikes all of this damned free media that’s out there confusing everyone.

And anyway, all of your money is supposed to belong to him, so that he can redistribute it for you, how dare you think you can do that, yourselves. Don’t you know that at a certain point, you’ve made enough money?

But, as we see with our artistic and athletic and political betters, money makes the world go ’round!

What do you think? I am not going to tell anyone to send a dollar anywhere, until I have some feedback. Would you participate? Or do you think it’s just a silly notion and I should let it go?

UPDATE:
Well, I’ll take that as a big “yes” – someone sent me $1.25, and someone sent me $5.00! Thanks, guys! See? I told you! We can all get rich!