Comments for Is FreeRice.com making $150k each day in profits?

Oli, if there's no adverts on this page it's not for lack of trying.
I quote: "You can advertise anywhere on the site".

Finally, somebody who gets it. A laudatory post by a good-hearted soul in a hobby forum about freerice.com a few days ago set me off, especially as the vast majority of the people discussing this seemed entirely innocent of arithmetic, or the ability to estimate. I went to my rice bin, brought some grains over to my O'Haus scale, and estimated 16,000 grains to the pound. A guess at five seconds to play a round leads to an estimate of an hourly productivity of about $0.05 per hour., given a world market price of $0.12 per pound

Simply put, freerice.com is evil, because it misleads good-hearted people into wasting their time by making them believe they are doing something worth while. If I try to analyze my seething anger at this con, it is because it is a cynical exploitation of virtue. One innocent soul posted that she had donated 5 bowls of rice, thinking that ten grains made a bowl. Another, slightly more realistic, was happy just to put a bite of food in a poor man's mouth, not knowing that ten grains is far short of what is normally referred to as a "bite."

Breen speaks for himself in the interview posted here:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/wavlength/archive/2007/11/should_you_trust_freericecom.shtml

It is not a registered nonprofit. In Breen's words, "It is just a website." You have to trust him. With no accountability.

Contemplating this for the last day or so, the most shocking thing to me is the automatic, laudatory response and near universal enthusiasm that has greeted this site. Coverage on news sites, CBS news with Katie Couric. Only the interviewer above, in a most timid fashion, asked the important questions of "How much in?" and "How much out?". (The answer was, "I don't know.)

If people have noticed, they have now increased the amount of grains from 10 to 20 per word !

Ignoring his revenue, you have to admit that the dollar value donated is far less impressive than the almost 5 billion grains of rice donated to date. The dollar value may only be around $50,000. Still I commend him for doing this. Doing something is better than doing nothing...and much better than sitting around complaining.

But people could having a much bigger impact by working even 1 hour at a min. wage job and donating that money to the World Food Progamme http://www.wfp.org/ than by clicking on freerice.com for an hour (which probably results in less than $1 donated per user-hour). Trouble is many people won't actually make the donations themselves. John Breen's efforts have brought more attention to this cause, some money, and the site also does help people with the vocabulary. So more power to him. And if he can make a living doing this, a fair reward for his simple yet innovative contribution.