Reddit Inc. is giving back to the community after it pledged Wednesday to donate 10 percent of its ad earnings from 2014 to charity.

Reddit reported advertising revenue of $8,276,594.93 for the year ending December 31st, meaning it will donate $827,659.49 to ten charities.

The charities to benefit from Reddit’s altruism? Reddit being Reddit, naturally the community is being asked to vote for the the charities they’d like to see the money given to.

Reddit has set up a specific site at reddit.com/donate in a partnership with New Jersey based company Charity Navigator that allows Reddit users to search for the charity they wish to vote for by name or EIN/Tax ID number. Users are allowed to vote for as many different charities as they like, but are limited to one vote per charity.

It’s a nice thing for Reddit to do however the advertising figure itself points to a different problem.

Reddit did 71.25 billion page views in 2014, and although it didn’t break out its unique figures, in January 2015 it had 157 million unique visitors; 8 and a bit million on that traffic is really, put quite simply, pathetic.

Although a somewhat apples and oranges comparison, Buzzfeed has similar unique visitor traffic to Reddit and yet reported revenue of over $100 million for 2014; although the page view numbers weren’t available for Buzzfeed, Reddit’s users are notoriously sticky, so it’s likely Reddit would have delivered much higher page view numbers than Buzzfeed. 

Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker in the film The Social Network famously states that ads aren’t cool, and that’s at least part of the problem Reddit faces; if it pushes too many ads on its users it risks alienating them and losing them. But likewise with $50 million in venture capital from investors including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Philip Kaplan and even Snoop Dog, at some stage Reddit is going to have to deliver far higher ad revenue than $8.3 million for a year.

Image credit: Reddit.