The article title reads "Freerice.com donates one-billionth grain of rice" which led me to believe they were so stuck up that they only donated 1/1,000,000,000 of a grain of rice. The title should have "one-billion grains...."

I wonder how many grains you actully need to make one bowl of rice. Seems like you would need quite a few.

Wish I had known this earlier

Well, let's try a little math here, just for the hell of it.
Assuming the average rice grain is 1 millimeter square by 4 millimeters long, the average grain of rice would occupy 4.0 x 10^-9 m^3.
One billion of these grains would therefore occupy 4 m^3. When cooked, that rice would take up around 12 m^3.
This is likely a severe underestimate, since rice is closer to being cylindrical and they will be arranged randomly, in the real world, which will lead to radically different results, but it should be within a cubic meter, I'd guess (which is still a lot of rice).
Also, this model assumes perfect close-packing of the rectangular rice grains. Maybe the overestimate of their individual volume would make up for their random arrangement... Who knows...

In any case, it's a decent amount of rice (should feed several hundred people), but it sounds more impressive than it really is, when they throw numbers like 1 billion around.
This likely cost them around $100.

This is childish, no one is counting to such small numbers for each word.

1billion grains of rice is 28,000 Kg

You need about 120 for the bowl graphic to fill, so I guess that's a bowl.

According to the site, every 100 grains you earn, it's a bowl... in the game at least.

The guise of doing good while getting rich. It's obvious that clicks and news coverage will get people to flock to this site. A few banner ads will easily pay for a few pallets of rice, the cheapest food on the planet. Meanwhile, the site inventor will rake in millions from advertising. Do the world a favor and DON'T go to this website.

it probably amounts to 1000 kilos of rice which does not amount to more than 500 dollars. probably the guy with the ad-dollars will be making 10x the money with the kind of exposure he's getting on such an important forum.

If you think it's not a good idea then what exactly are you doing for the starving people. Maybe this guy is making money from it, maybe he actually pays more to charity than we think, who knows. However the basic principle of this should at least inspire some people

What other online games are educational and also donate to charity?

And I seriouisly recomending it to people that want a nice warm fuzzy feeling from helping people

Some of you have charged that the site owner is a thief- is that just a baseless accusation, or do you have anything to base it on? As a site owner, I can tell you that advertisers don't pay very much for page views. To be honest, 1 cent per advertiser per page view is pretty good, and would line up with the cost of the rice to donate. JohnDoe recommends that you don't go to this site- what are you doing instead, John? Even if the owner was a thief, as you claim, surely it's doing some good.

It never occured to me about anyone making money. I teach inner city kids who are severely lacking in vocabulary. Here is a chance for them to do something good and learn words at the same time. They also need to learn empathy and sympathy for others less fortunate.

First we played the game, I explained what we were doing. They went to gym. When I brought them back, I had a picture of hungry children holding their bowls out. We played again, only this time, it was boys against girls to see who could get the most grains of rice. We donated 1000 grains of rice. Monday I will tell them that 120 grains make a bowl, and after we play the game, ask them how many children we have fed. I also will make a thermometer to show how many grains we get each day.

Feed the world as you're feeding your brain, one grain (or word) at a time. What a great concept. If the owner of the website is making money, he deserves every penny for an excellent idea!

Yes, you, "John Doe." And all other skeptical, bitter, pessimists.

It would have taken about a minute, in reading the entire FAQ, for you to find out that there is absolutely no profit being made from this project.

Stephanie, that made me SO happy! All of those ideas are so wonderful.

For those who are convinced that FreeRice.com is just a scheme to rake in advertising money for the admin, check out http://dailycow.org/node/165

After a few minutes of research, I leaned that a cup of rice contains just over 7000 grains (about 7250). Because rice expands to three times its original size when it is cooked, this would equal three cups. A bowl of rice is probably equal to 1.5 cups (if you think its more that that, its probably because you live in America, where the portion sizes are astronomical). According to freerice.com, there have been 23,202,482,290 grains of rice donated as of 3/19/2008. So, about 6,400,684.8 bowls of rice have been donated thus far. That is enough to feed one bowl of rice to about a quarter of Nepal's total population.

And to those of you who oppose the website and are attempting to convince others not to visit it, please stop. You have no proof to back up your arguments, and while this website is obviously not feeding millions of people every day, there is still room for improvement. Also, the website offers information on other ways to help end world hunger. If you cared at all about the hundreds of millions of impoverished people living in our world and the estimated 25,000 people who die per day of hunger-related causes, you would not advise against visiting this website.

Why would you discourage people from going to a site that is educational and may/may not help starving people. So what if the person is making some money off this. What makes it different from any other gaming site (HINT: those sites aren't educational).
Besides that, shouldn't we at least assume the site is feeding hungry people. At the very least the site is raising awareness and sympathy for starving people and inspiring similar campaigns for the cause.
If you don't want to go to this site then don't but why discourage people from learning new words and feeling good and getting into helping people less fortunate than them?