Giving the Gift of RICE Online

FreeRice.com dominates online Humanitarian industry by tapping into viral marketing and social media

Melbourne and Auckland – 21 November 2007 – As the charitable giving season approaches, Hitwise today reports on the success of FreeRice (www.freerice.com). This newly launched website has taken the number one rank amongst other Community - Humanitarian websites visited by Australian and New Zealand Internet users. For the week ending 17 November 2007, the website captured 13% of all visits to Humanitarian websites in Australia, and 34% of visits to Humanitarian websites in New Zealand. On average, Australians spent 16 minutes and 48 seconds, while New Zealanders spent 20 minutes and 1 second on the website.

Top Humanitarian Websites – Visited By Australian Internet Users – Week Ending 17 November 2007

Top Humanitarian Websites – Visited By New Zealand Internet Users – Week Ending 17 November 2007

FreeRice has captured the attention of people who are eager to take a simple online vocabulary test, and in exchange, the website will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations for each correct attempt. The end goal is to feed the world by improving the vocabulary of participants. The effort is funded by corporate sponsors such as American Express and iTunes.

FreeRice’s success is based on the influence of viral marketing and social networking. For the week ending 17 November 2007, in Australia, of the top 20 upstream sources of traffic, Email Services and Net Communities and Chat websites contributed more than 36% of visits to www.freerice.com, while Search Engines contributed 10% of visits. In New Zealand, Google, top Email Services and Net Communities and Chat websites contributed 15%, 13% and 16% of visits to FreeRice respectively. 

According to Tessa Court, Chief Marketing Officer of Hitwise, “The ingeniousness of this program, is that it creates awareness of world hunger through a game and enables everyone to ‘give’ without having to actually put their hands into their pockets.  Because it’s a ‘game’ – it’s also become a popular thing for individuals to promote on their MySpace sites and through Facebook groups.  Marketers from all sectors could learn from this case study of highly effective viral marketing.” 

Media Contact:

For more information, please contact Rebecca Hannon on 03 8530 2475 or rebecca.hannon@hitwise.com.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.