CSC101-02 Final Exam
Christopher Stern
Jennifer Paoletti
www.FreeRice.com
This website's purpose is to draw in visitors for mundane word-guessing games with the highly arbitrary and disillusioned altruistic goal of donating rice to hungry people, because as we all know there's nothing more filling than bland little white grains of rice. It is a good idea in that if donating food to people who actually need it was so easy it could potentially solve hunger problems throughout the entire galaxy. Finding synonyms to magically generate free food would certainly be a blessing, especially as it sure beats sending out a year and a half's worth of applications which just get ignored until you finally land a job with some unscrupulous employer who wants you to work until all hours of the night for a paycheck that never seems to add up just right. Now there just needs to be a website that provides electricity for counting the vowels of adjectives, clothing and shelter for solving long division, and providing unconditional compassion for coming up with rhymes for the word "blue". I would certainly try this site again if I ever came across it on StumbleUpon and was bored enough to waste hours on end like so many MySpace users are apt to do.
The catch, aside from the fact that some of the "correct" definitions may be debatable when compared to the other choices, is that inconsequential webloggers like "Oli" like to complain when people on the internet make profits when it doesn't have to do with serving fast food. Now the MySpacers and FaceBookers will become paranoid concerning conspiracies of so-called charities, tell people to avoid the site (which tends to be a futile gesture anyway) and try to get the FreeRice website shut down therefore ruining John Breen's amazing generation of revenue which probably goes to feeding his starving family. The catch on this catch is, however, that there is likely no way whatsoever that John Breen is making any revenue from automatically generated advertisements on his site. What sponsor would pay out cash each time someone hits the "refresh" button on their browser? And what server would be so inexpensive as to net Mr. Breen profit? That and given the price of gas and other necessities these days, a $150K+ profit is negligible. If he is making any profit from this simple method, then all the more power to him as he's earned it. At least he's not brainwashing couch-jumping celebrities. The other catch is it's just rice, the player doesn't get to eat the rice, and they don't tell you how they're going to cook the rice. Also, the rice is donated to Canadians, instead of nations like Africa or Rhode Island where there tend to be more hungry people with bigger appetites.
"So based on the ~15million pageviews figure, revenue could be upward of: $149,860." http://www.thepcspy.com/read/is_freericecom_making_150k_each_day_in_profits
Oli uses BOLDFACE text! That must mean he knows what he's talking about! Notice how "pageviews" is one word'; perhaps he should visit that new FreeRice.com website. I'd also like to meet these 15 million people who all visit this one webpage.
"The site is a viral marketing success story." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7088447.stm
So it's both like a virus, such as avian flu, and it's also a success, unlike avian flu. Nice to see that the British Broadcasting Company is using trendy internet lingo.
"It's a word game, monetized by Cost Per Action affiliate ad links, with a social justice twist. Those are just the boring details, though, and it's probably a scam." http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/freerice_legit_or_not_its_fun.php
"Social justice" is now a "twist", the website is judged on it being "boring", and Marshall Kirkpatrick (a fake name??) points out that it may be a scam. Which, of course, would be unheard of on the internet now that it's been completely taken over and monopolized by the media and commercialism (wink).