I love the spirit of this, but I would never put it on a serious site.
I put things on the web so people can see/use them. If they come to my site, I want them to get what they're looking for. If I'm going to serve a 404, it's either because a) I screwed up, or b) somebody mistyped something. In either case, distracting them with something else can only take them farther away from their original goal.
I wonder whether that works at all for web sites that have essentially global reach. Children from the US are unlikely to appear in Germany all of a sudden, I guess. (Incidentally, the example page for »Other countries« was in Greek which I cannot even read).
I wonder—can they demonstrate whether or not it’s achieved anything? It’s an interesting idea, but I’m dubious about its efficacy. Now if Microsoft and GitHub both used it—
I put things on the web so people can see/use them. If they come to my site, I want them to get what they're looking for. If I'm going to serve a 404, it's either because a) I screwed up, or b) somebody mistyped something. In either case, distracting them with something else can only take them farther away from their original goal.