Imagine advertisers paying you to watch their latest TV spot. We’re all used to this in some form or another: we already get “paid,” in a sense, to watch YouTube videos after the ads roll. A decade ago, we were rewarded with our favorite sitcom after a long stream of un-skippable ads.

But advertisers have been wary of paying consumers actual cash for two reasons. First, paying pennies for a few minutes of a viewer’s time implies that time is not very valuable.

Second, it admits the content is so undesirable that the advertiser is desperate enough to pay people to watch it. Either way, it’s a bottom-of-the-market play.

As a result, this model has never really taken off. But that doesn’t mean some aren’t trying.

Last week, CBS launched its Viewers to Volunteers initiative, which donates money to charity on viewers’ behalf rather, than paying them directly.

Using charities to turn engagement into donations is not new. In 2007, the UN World Food Programme launched nonprofit website Freerice, which has since engaged millions of users. Here’s the proposition: see a banner ad, answer a question, and the UN will donate 10 grains of rice. So far, 97bn grains of rice have been donated, according to the website.

If Freerice is the 1.0 version of this watch-to-give advertising model, CBS has just brought us version 2.0.

While it’s still in beta testing, details are now emerging about how the platform will work. Viewers will watch a piece of sponsor-vetted video content, the kind that CBS EcoMedia founder Paul Polizzotto calls “good news about our world”. Sometimes this will be advertorials, or straight sustainability reporting about brands like Toyota; other times, the content will be corporate-sponsored mini-documentaries about pioneering nonprofits or stories about communities making change.

For each view or share, the viewer will earn points, which can be converted to donations to a charity of the viewer’s choosing.

Polizzotto’s vision for the platform, he told me, is “to let everyone become a philanthropist, even if you have no money”.

But how much money is a viewer’s time worth? Polizzotto won’t say directly, but he did indicate a video view could be worth as much as $2-$3. That may seem impossible, given that a video view is usually worth only pennies to an advertiser. But Viewers to Volunteers chops off blocks of donation money from much larger CBS deals to fund the platform’s giving.

Will this level of reward cross some threshold that will see viewers flock to the platform? My guess is no, even with the planned gamification of the platform that Polizzotto says is coming.

But if these high financial incentives can be aligned with truly great content, the model could get interesting very quickly. If V2V can feature and share the kind of viral heartwarming stories that users scan BuzzFeed or Upworthy for, and then tie each view to a donation that impacts the lives of the people in that story, CBS and their advertisers could strike gold.

Here’s what it could look like. First, take an emotional viral story, such as this one of a young woman hearing for the first time in her life. Then tie it to a relevant sponsor – as Microsoft has already done, in the above example, with powerful results. Finally, offer a meaningful per-view donation to help bring the hearing technology to others.

A few hits like these could inspire millions of microphilanthropists Polizzotto talks about.

The catch? CBS will have to invest in procuring a steady stream of great content relevant to its advertisers’ brands and to the network’s audience. Of course, this is exactly the kind of investment traditional networks looking to be digitally relevant should make.

The best case scenario is that V2V becomes a major win for brands, for CBS and for donors. But if CBS expects the dollars and the platform to speak for itself, V2V will likely end up as a backwater populated by a few hundred over-messaged power users who have learned to click, ignore, give and repeat.

Either way, the experiment will be worth watching.

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