Airbnb spending $1 million to urge hosts to do good

SAN FRANCISCO — Airbnb wants to help thousands of its community members rev up the new year in an altruistic gear.

The home-sharing platform today unveils a $1 million initiative that will find 100,000 Airbnb hosts receiving $10 each, along with a challenge to use the small gift toward a gesture that makes the world a smaller place, chief marketing officer Jonathan Mildenhall tells USA TODAY.

"Our vision has always been to put our host community front and center, and this is just our way of putting that rhetoric into practice," he says, adding that hosts were chosen at random. "We're excited to see what they come up with."

Mildenhall says the $10 could be used to buy seeds to plant in a community garden or to purchase art supplies for a neighborhood senior center. Whatever the gesture, hosts who receive the funds are encouraged to trumpet their good deed on social media and tag it #OneLessStranger.

Despite the boom in sharing-economy companies, "we still have a great fear of people we don't know," says Mildenhall. "I suppose an Airbnb host can use the funds to do something nice for a guest, but we'd really like to see it used on strangers. Admittedly, the whole thing is an experiment."

The timing of the initiative matches the company's single-busiest night. Last New Year's Eve, 350,000 people made their overnight arrangements via Airbnb's global network of 1 million homes, apartments and rooms. For this year's holiday, 600,000 are projected to use the lodging service.

For all of 2014, an estimated 16 million people used Airbnb, which was founded in 2009 by CEO Brian Chesky and currently is valued at $13 billion.

Although the company's rise has been swift — there are Airbnb properties in more than 200 countries to date — it hasn't been without hiccups. Much like its ride-sharing counterparts Uber and Lyft, Airbnb has in some cities run up against regulatory concerns.

In New York, for example, local officials pressed for and received lists of Airbnb properties they claimed were not paying the appropriate taxes. And in its Bay Area hometown here, the company sometimes is accused of being a part of the short-term rental gentrification of the city.

But CEO Chesky has maintained that the Airbnb mission is to "bring back the idea of cities as villages," as he wrote in a blog post when touting the boom in Airbnb properties in Portland, Ore.

Today's $10 giveaway is part of that push, says Mildenhall.

"We believe that personalized hospitality is a key way to chip away at the concept of strangers," he says. "This is just our small way of helping people pay it forward."