Is There No Free Rice?

A reader asks:

http://www.freerice.com/

You should blog about this. Why do they work? DO they work? How do they work, are they run on ads?

I hate them and love them. Not like my 400 grains of rice will feed even a single person. It's kind of insulting. But it's fun to do, too.

My reply:

The vocabulary game is fun.
I agree in giving food to the hungry.
You give 20 grains of rice per round of the game.
There are 29,000 grains of rice per pound.
That means 1,450 rounds of the rice vocabulary game per pound of rice.
A pound of rice probably costs about $1 a pound. This is probably actually be lower, since large rice purchases for humanitarian reasons is made by the ton.
There are ads on that game, but they only get real money if you click-through.
If people click-through one percent of the time, then they perhaps get 10 cents per click-through or 14 click-throughs per pound of rice.
14 times 10 cents is $1.40 which is more than the cost of a pound of rice.

So, it is possible for someone to pay for the rice and maybe even make a little money at the same time.
The rice for the poor is supposed to be guaranteed, but the ad revenue is not, since someone has to click on the ads.
So if I were to guess, the owner of this site is either giving all the ad revenue to the rice people or perhaps a portion like 75 percent.

My conclusion is if you like the game and want to work on your vocabulary, then go ahead and use freerice.com without feeling guilty.