Is The Hunger Site worth it?
The Hunger Site sends you an email every day; you click through to the site and click a button; the sponsors show you ads and then promise to donate a certain amount to several charities that feed poor people.
I’d guess that the amount of good done is fairly low, but it’s also not costing me as a participant any money, only a few seconds every day. Those seconds are not time that I might theoretically otherwise spend working and earning more money that I could donate elsewhere. So, while it seems like the system as a whole is an inefficient way to do good, it also seems like, from a personal perspective, doing it is more good than not doing it; neither time nor money is being spent (by me) on it that might go towards more efficient charity.
Personal Disclosure: I’ve been clicking almost every day for a few years now, and I’m getting tired of doing so. I know that, ultimately, I’m tired of it because I’m not getting positive feedback about the good being accomplished—any good being done is several steps removed and so, in a sense, it’s invisible to the user of the site—so my brain isn’t giving me positive rewards for thinking of myself as being a good person. I’m probably fighting a losing battle and going to stop anyway, but someone else telling me that it’s worth it would probably sustain the behavior for longer than otherwise.
So...has EA ever looked into analyzing whether The Hunger Site is worth a couple seconds per day? Whether any money actually ever makes it to poor people? A google search on “effective altruism the hunger site” and a search of this forum for “the hunger site” didn’t turn up any indications that EA has looked at it. Should I just donate $10 to the Anti-Malaria Foundation that I wouldn’t otherwise and say that that accomplishes more good than a lifetime of clicking on The Hunger Site?
A site that brings in money by showing ads generally makes under $10 per 1000 visits (CPM) so at most $0.01 per visit. Even if we make unrealistically positive assumptions (they’re getting very high CPMs, they donate 100% of the money, the money goes to charities that are as valuable as the AMF) then $10 to the AMF does as much good as visiting the Hunger Site daily for three years. With the same unrealistically positive assumptions, if this takes you 10s each time then you’re working for under $3.60/hr.
So I think this is probably not worth looking into further. Volunteering to look at ads just doesn’t bring in that much money so even if you got the best possible answers to your questions it wouldn’t make sense.
(Similarly, I don’t think trying to clone a site like this and run it targeted at GiveWell top charities would be worth it either.)
Thanks. I just gave $10 to the AMF and set a reminder to do so again next year (although I hope to be in the giving-10%-of-income category by then).
I see things similar to the Hunger Site pop up pretty frequently in large EA Facebook groups, and will share this comment whenever it happens (the numbers may be a bit different, e.g. for “donate while you shop” sites, but the general thought pattern of “can I donate to not think about this?” seems very useful).
First off, it’s really cool that you’ve been so committed to this over time! I bet you have benefited many people, and it sounds like you’ve put in a lot of effort.
“Should I just donate $10 to the Anti-Malaria Foundation that I wouldn’t otherwise and say that that accomplishes more good than a lifetime of clicking on The Hunger Site?”
If I were trying to answer this question, I’d probably contact the Hunger Site seeking concrete answers on a) which charities are being donated to and b) how much is being donated per click on average. I bet if you told them your story, they’d be happy to help you find that information. Good luck!
Also, if you do this, please come back and tell us what you discovered :)
While I didn’t email the Hunger Site to find more concrete info, I did look more into their website for answers. What I saw seemed...sketchy, although more detailed info from an email might have offered satisfactory answers.
Their results page measures success in “cups of food”. They have a list of “charitable partners”: GreaterGood.org, Mercy Corps, Food Recovery Network, Millenium Promise, and Partners in Health. Mercy Corps does include food help on its list of things it does, but that food work is mostly about helping poor people create sustainable agriculture and other things like that, that don’t involve actually donating food. Food Recovery appears to be about scrounging surplus food and giving it to other food charities.
All in all, that gives me the impression that “cups of food” has little or nothing to do with actual cups of food. Instead, I think it’s a proxy for “we donated X dollars to partner charities, and they did whatever with it that they usually do”.
That doesn’t *have* to be a deal-breaker, since those charities are still doing good things, probably worth donating to. But it does make me feel like I can’t trust Hunger Site to accurately portray what it’s doing. Furthering that, the chart on the results page has a column ambiguously labelled “pounds”, without any indication of what that means. Pounds of food donated (if so, through which charity, and where)? Money donated in U.K. pounds (unlikely, b/c I think it’s a U.S. charity)? That column is stuck off on the side as if it’s the black sheep in a family photo. I don’t know what to make of that.