Cool (and worthwhile) new subscription marketing ploy?

Whether it's primarily a circulation ploy or A Good Thing (they say it's both), I like the idea of US-based GOOD Magazine's fundraising drive / subscription offer: You gotta pay $20 for a subscription, but all of that money will go to the worthy cause you select.

On the "Why are we doing this?" page, they point out that most magazines don't make money off paid circulation anyway, so why bother going through all that?

"This whole thing is an experiment," they say. "Our goal for our launch year is to create 6 amazing issues of GOOD, sign up 50,000 subscribers and donate $1 million to their favorite organizations."

Their site comes complete with a progress thermometer so you can see how well they're doing in their subscription drive (with presumably 10 months to go, they're at 2,716 subs so far), and a viral push to "tell your friends".

We will be interested to see how they fare.

[Of course, not being inclined to believe everything we read, particularly on the ol' Internets, we wonder how one would know if GOOD actually gave all the proceeds to the organizations shown (or if they ever meant to in the first place). But forgive us for being such skeptics.]

P.S. In an exchange of comments on Boing Boing, someone from GOOD replied to a query that "You can subscribe in Canada! It's a new offering for us which is why it isn't yet enabled on our site. For now, e-mail info(at)goodmagazine.com to get a subscription in Canada."