I'm enjoying FreeRice.com, but...

[jan_andrea]

I just looked it up and it takes roughly 29,000 grains of long white rice to make a pound.

So in playing for about 30 minutes (with a top vocab level of 47 but a median of closer to 43, out of 50), I've donated 4,000 grains... or about 1/7 of a pound.

Also, in Googling it, I found this page: http://debrisblog.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/free-rice-or-free-publicity/

I'll still play, but will give to the World Food Programme in dollars as well as vocab, since the former will go a lot further.

Comments

[selaura.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing they had a tech-type person figure out the average number of hits the site would take per day and the maximum amount of money that could be donated per day and came up with a formula so they don't exceed x dollars per day. For people with limited charity budgets, they can still feel as though they are "giving" without the strain on their resources. It would be interesting to know just how many hits they do get a day.

[dnl2002.livejournal.com]

According to freerice.com's totals page (http://freerice.com/totals.html), from October 7th to yesterday, they've donated 3,664,079,450 grains of rice. So using the 29,000 per pound, that's roughly 126,347.5 pounds. So that's an average of 2578.5 pounds a day since the page started.

Here's their FAQ page: http://freerice.com/faq.html