If it is anything like his previous company, The Hunger Site, it is not a nonprofit organization so it doesn't actually qualify as a charity. That means none of the charity rating organizations will be able to check on them and none of the records have to be subject to public scrutiny.

That pretty much covers it. He sold The Hunger Site for an "undisclosed amount." Now he's got another one going. There's an entry on him on Wikipedia.

Yeah, I doubt you'll get an answer. Or you'll get the dewy eyed innocent response with no actual information.

You're right, I missed that. I'm wondering what his costs were, as there are a couple of magazine articles explaining that he got a half cent for every 3 cents the charities got and he sold the site a year or so after he started it. Maybe he figured out a better way to run the thing costwise this time.

Supposing that he's offering an entertaining vocabulary game, just giving a tiny bit to charity, and making a substantial amount of money for himself, does it make the world a worse place in any noticable way?

Do you think there are innumerate people playing and playing because they think they're getting substantial amounts of rice sent? This is a real question--I have no idea if many people would get snagged that way.

To my mind, the cheesiest thing about the site is the implication that it will help you improve your vocabulary. I don't think that sort of contextless exposure makes it possible to remember words.

And what are the odds that people are noticing the ads?

I wasn't paying attention to that rice bowl graphic--I know ten grains of rice is very little, and let that override what I was seeing. I was clear that I was having fun demonstrating my vocabulary, and the charitable side was just a gimmick.

There are more than three ads--they repeat, but the ad rotation might be enough to get past the lower payment for repetition issue.

But still, advertisers don't pay for nothing. If they found the ad system untenable, they wouldn't pay, so I figure they must be getting something out of it.

I don't believe people in business are especially efficient. (I'm a libertarian because I believe government is worse than business, not because I believe business is reliably wonderful by any measure.)

Consider clothes for fat women. The large numbers of fat women has been a known and obvious fact for decades--the availability of nice clothing for them has only improved slowly, and still isn't very good.

Contemplate the sub-prime lending mess. A little thought and research would have suggested to banks that they were investing in unsustainable loans.

Thinking is hard work, especially if you don't know you've got something you need to think about. Even if you do want to think, sometimes the information you need is not yet gathered or is impossible to get. What your customers will want six months from now isn't knowable, and it can be hard to figure out what they want to buy now.

How much to spend on what sort of advertising is one of those non-optimizable issues, especially when you're figuring out the multi-year process of building a brand.

I'm not saying advertising is entirely a waste of a company's money, just that any particular piece of advertising involves a lot of guessing. Print advertising for mail order is an exception--it's possible to do controlled experiments there. I expect there is similarly testable web advertising.