I just found out about this website, freerice.com that donates rice to the United Nations World Food Program based on a users ability to correctly identify synonyms. Despite the SAT-like quality, I find the site addictive, particularly as it scales to your vocabulary level (and tells you what level you are performing on), but I started to wonder how efficient a form of charity it is.
Turns out it's hard to say, largely because it hasn't been registered as a non-profit.
The guy who started the site a little over a month ago, John Breen, has this to recommend him: he started a sister site earlier in the year called poverty.com, which draws attention to the constellation of life-threatening illnesses and diseases associated with poverty around the globe and encourages those who care about seeing an end to world poverty to become more informed about the issues and write letters to world leaders, encouraging economic contributions to aid poor countries. There are no ads anywhere on poverty.com. Instead a map of the globe acts as a backdrop to pictures, faces of those recently deceased from hunger, AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases.
Freerice.com, on the other hand, earns money - obviously, to buy the rice - by placing ads near the bottom of the page (which I honestly didn't notice until it was pointed out to me). Since the site is not a registered charity or non-profit, it is not obligated to publish information about how much money it makes or how much money goes directly toward the cause. A couple bloggers have already attempted to calculate how much money is made and how much the rice must cost, reaching an estimate of xxx profit for Breen, but there are a number of unknowns - no one really knows the payment structure of the ads posted, no one knows what indirect costs need to be paid to employees or even what direct costs, such as transportation, are being covered by freerice. So, who is to say? From what I can deduce, I believe at this point the effort is most likely earning just enough to cover costs, but in the future when more and more visitors find the site will the earnings begin to grow faster than the costs?
More importantly, do I care? If food is being made available to people who need it by someone who is not claiming to be a non-profit, does it matter if he earns money off the venture?
Especially since, in addition to feeding people that so many others have given up on, he's providing an addictive form of procrastination, uh, I mean entertainment for those of us blessed with high-speed internet connections, which last I checked generally garners an income for someone.
11/16 edit: John Breen also started this site, now run by CharityUSA (I think), that donates money to the UN World Food program as well.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
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