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Freerice

Type of site	Click-to-donate site
Headquarters	Rome, Italy
Owner	World Food Programme
Created by	John Breen
URL	freerice.com
Commercial	No
Launched	October 7, 2007; 17 years ago (2007-10-07)
Current status	Active

Freerice is a website and mobile application that allows players to donate rice to families in need by playing a multiple-choice quiz game. For every question the user answers correctly, ten grains of rice is donated via the United Nation's World Food Programme. There are over 40 available categories including English, Geography, Humanities, Language Learning, Math, and Science. The categories can be played on up to five difficulty levels, depending on the subject. A user's total score is displayed as a mound of rice and number of grains earned.

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 November 20, 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. Since July 30, 2020, it has been temporarily reduced to 5 grains and later 1 due to a collapse in the advertising market from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2009, Breen donated the FreeRice website to the 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 Beta Launch

In August 2018, the UN World Food Programme launched a newer, more improved version of the game on a new website. Apps for iOS and Android have also been released with this version of the website.

Leaderboards

Freerice users can see the total rice they donated, as well as their current ranking on the site. The website also allows creating groups, of which players can join using a group code. The group score is determined by the total rice donated by the group members while they are a part of the group. The website publicly displays two leaderboards of the top 50 individuals and top 50 groups, along with the scores of each.

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 Nations' 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

• Digital Communications Award 2011 – Best Corporate Game
• TIME Magazine – 50 Best Websites 2011
• 15th Annual Webby Awards – Honoree
• 2010 Parent's Choice Awards – Online Learning
• TIME Magazine – 50 Best Websites 2008
• Yahoo! Pick of the Year 2007 – Charity Category – Winner
• Berkman Award to Freerice.com creator, John Breen. He was recognized with a Berkman Award on May 16, 2008, for creating Freerice. At the Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's tenth anniversary gala dinner, recipients of the Berkman Awards were chosen for their outstanding contributions to the Internet's impact on society over the past 10 years.

Monthly count

Total All Dates (as of August 2014): 102,819,312,476

Modified data as of May 31, 2021: 102,246,216,989.

Milestones

• October 7, 2007 – Freerice launches with 830 grains of rice donated on its first day
• November 10, 2007 – Freerice breaks the one-day 100,000,000-grain milestone with 122,377,240 donated grains
• November 28, 2007 – With continued sponsor support, Freerice doubles the number of grains donated for each correct definition from 10 to 20
• December 17, 2007 – Freerice breaks the one-day 300,000,000-grain milestone with 358,559,540 donated grains
• December 19, 2007 – 10 billion grains donated in total
• April 2, 2008 – 25 billion grains donated in total
• November 11, 2008 – 50 billion grains donated in total
• September 2010 – A new version of the game (Freerice 2.0) was launched with social networking and group functionality
• January 2011 – 85 billion grains donated in total
• June 2011 – A Spanish version is launched
• September 2011 – A French version and Italian version are launched
• October 2011 – A Chinese version is launched
• December 2011 – A Korean version is launched
• January 2012 – Over 94 billion grains donated in total and over 1 million registered players
• February 2012 – The first official World Freerice Week was held, and two new subjects launched (World Landmarks and Human Anatomy), and soon thereafter deletes millions of grains earned by top participants confused with bots
• April 2012 – Launched an SAT subject
• August 2013 – Reached 100 billion grains of rice
• February 2015 – 300 billion grains donated in total
• August 2018 – Freerice launches their beta website with a fresh new look
• February 2019 – Freerice releases their first rice-raising app on Google Play
• May 2019 – Freerice announces on Facebook they will be shutting down Freerice 2.0 in favor of their beta version
• July 2019 – Freerice releases beta iOS app in the App Store
• August 29, 2019 – Freerice 2.0 shuts down and Freerice Beta takes over

References

1. ^ Ceceri, Kathy (2010-03-04). "Free Rice Expands Your Word Power and Feeds the Hungry".
2. "Feed a child for Thanksgiving". Archived from the original on 2007-11-25.
3. "Freerice". freerice.com. Retrieved 2020-08-04.
4. "Web game provides rice for hungry". BBC News. 2007-11-10.
5. http://www.slideshare.net/GreenBeingNancy/400-grams-of-rice
6. "Total Donations By Date". Archived from the original on 2008-03-26. Retrieved 2008-03-28.
7. Find of the Year 2007, Category Charity (accessed on February 7, 2008).
8. https://web.archive.org/web/20101207184318/http://www.freerice.com/frmisc/totals
10. ^ - Freerice totals - 2014 Oct 31 Only partial totals are available for October 31, but about as close as we're going to get for the full month as we currently have.
11. The full year totals for Freerice.com have been glitched since at least Jan 2015 and now display negative numbers. Without these totals we cannot calculate overall grains donated.
12. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2013-09-28. Retrieved 2013-09-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
13. "Totals | Freerice.com". freerice.com. Archived from the original on 2013-09-28. Retrieved 2016-06-25.

Glitch notes

1. ^ Freerice's totals seem to have glitched around September 2013. Comparing webarchive.org shots from May and Sept of 2013, the 2010 totals curiously drop from ~13 billion to 9 bil grains; also, closed months in 2013 suddenly increase as well (for example, January 2013 went from 274 mil to 786 mil). Finding it unlikely that billions of grains can be recalled nearly 3 years after they were eaten, I calculate the values here from previous records instead. Recalling how 2010 was the year Free Rice ("1.0") transitioned to Freerice 2.0, the "new" 2010 total seems strangely similar to amounts my records attribute to the original Free Rice. In other words, the new count resembles the result of subtracting 2.0 grains from the old 2010 count. While this result came out 19 mil grains higher than recorded for 1.0, that discrepancy may be explained by how the transition on the 7th of October had prevented this Wikipedian from recording "1.0" grains from the first 6 days of that month since initial 2.0 total page seemed to exclude them. (I imagine perhaps Freerice saw that the totals were less than expected but did not know they were missing from 2010, and so fudged the prior months of 2013 to make up for the missing grains?) -CodeHydro
2. web.archive.org - Freerice totals - 2013 Sept 28
3. web.archive.org - Freerice totals - 2013 May 29

Freerice glitched in late December 2015, and the yearly total became a negative number, thus subtracting the year's totals from the aggregate total. The problem has reappeared in 2015 and 2016, so the issue appear to be with 32-bit signed binary integers counting the grains. This explains why the displayed total is so much lower than the true total.

External links

• Official website
• Freerice at WFP.org

• Click-to-donate sites
• Internet properties established in 2007