The Hunger Site
|
Type of site
|
For-profit corporation |
|---|---|
| Owner | CharityUSA |
| Created by | John Breen |
| Website | thehungersite.com |
| Alexa rank |
 462,435 (April 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | June 1999 |
The Hunger Site is the original click-to-donate site created in 1999 that gets sponsorship from advertisers in return for delivering users who will see their advertisements. The Hunger site encourages visitors to click a button on the site, once per day, asserting that each unique click results in a donation "equivalent" to 1.1 cups of food. The Hunger Site is not a charity; it is a for-profit corporation which donates the revenue from its advertising banner to selected charities. Currently, these are Millennium Promise, Food Recovery Network, Partners in Health, Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest) and Mercy Corps.
The Hunger Site was started by John Breen, a computer programmer from Bloomington, Indiana, in June 1999. Originally a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, the site became popular rapidly. "[T]he response was soon so overwhelming that he spent most of his time administering the site even though he received no income, loans, grants, or donations to compensate him for his time and effort or pay his expenses." Faced with increasing costs, Breen sold the site to GreaterGood, "a Seattle-based online shopping mall that gave part of its sales to charity" for an undisclosed amount in February 2000. In July 2001, following the dot-com bubble crash, GreaterGood ceased operations after losing $26 million in venture capital. In 2001, CharityUSA.com, LLC, a privately held, for-profit company based in Seattle, assumed control of the company for one million dollars. CharityUSA owns and operates various click-to-donate-sites. CharityUSA currently claims that 100% of the website's sponsor advertising revenue is paid to the aforementioned non-profit partners. The Commercial Fundraiser Profile Report page on the Secretary of State's web page for the state of Washington calculates the percentage that CharityUSA returns to its charity clients as being 17% of the company's total revenue (labeled as contributions, although the company's explanation on the same page defines this as mix of contributions and sale of products). The same explanation of operations covers how the overall operation of all the GreaterGood Network sites work and reads in part:
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