The Ad Industry Built a Machine Nonprofits Can't Afford to Plug Into. One Founder Changed That for $250.

Tim Rowe

May 1, 20262 min read

The Ad Industry Built a Machine Nonprofits Can't Afford to Plug Into. One Founder Changed That for $250.

The streaming advertising ecosystem has a structural access problem, and it has nothing to do with targeting or measurement. It has to do with the minimum buy.

Kris Johns watched it from a blood donation chair at the Red Cross. Empty seats. The same empty seats, seven visits in a row. A cause with genuine community demand and zero ability to reach the people who'd show up if they just knew. The Red Cross wasn't failing at its mission. It was failing at marketing it, because premium streaming inventory was priced for brands, not for causes.

And so, Kris decided to do something about it. He built AdGood to help fix it, here's how: Johns built a 501(c)(3) that aggregates unused streaming inventory across Samsung Ads, LG, A+E, and Scripps, and other top publishers, then routes it to nonprofits at 70% or more below market rate. The minimum spend is $250. For that, a small nonprofit gets a connected television ad campaign, a creative tool that produces a broadcast-ready 30-second spot in under four minutes without any skills or training, and performance reporting.

The results are not theoretical. The Charles Dickinson Enrichment Center, a music education nonprofit operating in two counties, ran consistent campaigns at $200 to $400 per flight. Year over year, event turnout increased 233%. Donations increased 433%..

How's that for a case study?

"We really want to try to help nonprofits turn marketing from a cost center to an actual profit center," Johns told State of Streaming.

"A lot of the major nonprofits are really powerful performance marketing houses. We're trying to bring some level of that to the smaller nonprofits as well."

The access gap Johns built around is structural. Donated media has historically been fragmented, scarce, and inaccessible without deep industry relationships. A nonprofit in Gallatin, Texas has the same impression delivery problem as a national organization, just at a different scale.

"Unless they know media, it becomes a much higher lift," Johns said. "We aggregate all this unused premium inventory across streaming TV and make it accessible at extremely steep discounts, only for nonprofits."

AdGood is currently at 3.5 billion available impressions per month across 120-plus nonprofit partners. Publishers get impact reports, donor acknowledgment letters, and the one thing a Q4 inbox almost never contains: proof that their inventory did something that mattered.

This is not a feel-good story about ad tech giving back. It is an argument that the infrastructure already exists to make every nonprofit a performance marketing organization, and one of their own has already built the access layer.