Benelab is a search engine created by Jack Kim that donates 100% of its revenue to charity. Kim transformed an everyday task like web search into a vehicle for good. Kim learned HTML and website design as a freshman in high school and enjoyed it so much he began designing his own websites. His first website was a search engine that averaged around 2,000 visitors per month. And Kim made around 200-300 dollars per month with this elementary search engine. That is when Kim realized how easy it was to make money on search engines with relatively few visitors. From this experience, Kim realized he could use a search engine to generate money for charity. Benesearch.com was launched and it simply rerouted searches to Google and generated revenue, or in this case donations, on a CPM basis.
The summer after creating the website, Kim attended a business program at Stanford where he learned the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and he decided to take another shot at his search engine idea. He relaunched the website as Benelab.org and routed the searches through Bing this time. He created his team from friends at his high school. Kim wanted the company to have a young entrepreneurial feel with all young business partners.
Jack Kim innovated in an industry that is dominated by Google, Yahoo and Bing. And the idea of a charity search engine isn’t knew. But Benelab is the first search engine to donate 100% of its revenue to charity. If only 1 in 1 million people switched to Benelab, the non-profit would be able to donate $250,000 a month to charity.
Thanks for sharing! It’s always good to hear about simple ways people are making a difference. Kim was able to take something that people use everyday and make money off of it. That’s a very cool new perspective on raising money for charity, especially because 100% goes to charity, which is really impressive. Thank you for sharing this story.
What a simple, yet effective business, with a social enterprise backbone that is grounded in young people. I love it! It is so interesting to me how a freshman in high school came up with this idea that is completely centered around giving back and supporting the spirit of youth and entrepreneurship. Great post!
Its great to see young entrepreneurs using their ideas for the greater good rather than their own personal gain. It would be so easy to just use a simple idea like this to supplement income but instead they decided to help make the world a better place! I wish more people would realize the potential impact they could have on the world with their good ideas!