FreeRice
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Type of site
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Click-to-donate site |
|---|---|
| Owner | The World Food Programme |
| Created by | John Breen |
| Website | freerice.com |
| Alexa rank |
 41,567 (January 2, 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | October 7, 2007 |
| Current status | Active |
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.
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.
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."
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.
On July 31st, 2017, Freerice announced on their official Facebook page that they will be rebuilding Freerice to make the webgame more user-friendly on mobile. They also changed their logo and color scheme, suggesting big changes for the user interface.
The website allows creating groups to track the total donations of a group of players. Top group scores are displayed on a scoreboard.
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).
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