FreeRice and HotOrNot

FreeRice.com is an innovative little site where visitors participate in an endless vocabulary quiz.  A project of poverty.com, FreeRice re-loads a new page, with a new advertisement, every time the user answers a new question.  That cost-per-impression-based ad revenue is used to "end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free"  through a United Nations program.  Each correct vocabulary answer nets the program 20 grains of rice.

It's not much on a per-page basis, but it adds up quickly - over 11 billion grains of rice in the first two and a half months since the site launch.

The site is a loose derivation of one of the giant viral sites on the web, HotOrNot.com.  There, users upload their photos and visitors rate a random photo on a scale of 1 to 10.  Cycling through photos, visitors generate a tremendous amount of page views, ad impressions and presumably ad revenue.  HotOrNot boasts over 13 Billion votes counted and 32,649,000 photos submitted. 

Innovative marketing ideas are by themselves generally neither "good" nor "bad".  The intention and execution, however, is the difference between a vapid, narcissistic cash cow and a philanthropic, educational socially conscious contribution to society.