Type of site Click-to-donate site Website freerice.com | Created by John Breen Commercial Yes | |
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Owner The World Food Programme Alexa rank 41,567 (January 2, 2017) | ||
Freerice is an ad-supported, free-to-play website that allows players to donate to charities by playing multiple-choice quiz games. For every question the user answers correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated via the World Food Programme. The available subjects include English vocabulary (the original subject with which the game launched), multiplication tables, pre-algebra, chemical symbols (basic and intermediate), English grammar, SAT, foreign language vocabulary for English speakers (French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish), human anatomy, geography (flags of the world, world capitals, country identification, and world landmarks), the identification of famous artwork, literature, quotations, and world hunger. A user's total score is displayed as a mound of rice and the number of grains.
Contents
History
The website went live on October 7, 2007 with 830 grains of rice donated on its first day. The site was created by John Breen, a computer programmer, to help his son study for the SAT exam. The second word in its name was originally capitalized as "FreeRice." On 20 November 2007, the WFP launched a campaign to "feed a child for Thanksgiving," encouraging internet users "to take time out from traditionally the busiest online shopping period of the year and help the hungry" by playing the game. For a brief while, the amount of rice donated per correct answer was increased to 20 grains, though this was reduced to 10 grains of rice per answer within a few months.
In March 2009, Breen donated the FreeRice website to the UN World Food Programme.
Freerice 2.0 launch
In September 2010, the UN World Food Programme launched a new version of the game with social networking, groups, rankings and achievements. As part of the launch, the site dropped the second capitalization in its name, going from "FreeRice" to "Freerice."
Freerice Language Versions
In 2011, Freerice launched new language versions of the website in Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Korean, allowing users to play the popular game across a number of subjects in their own language for the first time. Freerice China is currently offline, as the World Food Programme has ended its contract with the partner responsible for building and maintaining it.
Freerice 3.0
On November 1, 2016, Free Rice announced that it will be rebuilding to Free Rice 3.0. Currently, a survey is accessible from Free Rice's homepage. It is meant to help the users improve Free Rice and offer their input.
FreeRice 3.0 is expected to roll out September of 2017,
Groups
The website allows creating groups to track the total donations of a group of players. Top group scores are displayed on a scoreboard.
Sustenance
Using the "click-to-donate" model, for every correct answer selected a sponsored advertisement is displayed below the questions. The total funds raised through the sponsored ads covers the cost of the rice donated. All the costs for running the website are covered by the site owner, the United Nations's World Food Programme or vendors supplying their services free of charge. The donations are distributed by the (WFP).
The most common countries receiving rice are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bhutan, Uganda, and Nepal, but Freerice can travel all over the world (as of early 2008). Following the earthquake in Haiti, nearly 6 billion grains were donated to help communities there. By this time, the site's creator had given over US$213,000 to the WFP, which encouraged people to visit the website.
Effectiveness
In its first ten months of operation, Freerice donated over 42 billion grains of rice. One month after the inception of the viral marketing program, users had earned enough points for one billion grains of rice. The United Nation's World Food Program stated that this amount could feed 50,000 people for one day, since it takes 400 grams or about 19,200 grains of rice to feed one adult for a day. Using this calculation, enough rice was donated in 2008 to feed over 6,000 people daily for each day of that year. Since its inception, as of April 3, 2013, Freerice players had earned sufficient rice for over 10 million meals, assuming 2 meals per day.
Awards
Total All Dates (as of August 2014): 102,819,312,476
Modified data as of February 28, 2017: 96,661,940,638.