I assume that many of you are familiar with The Hunger Site where, by clicking on a button, you can “contributeâ€쳌 to providing staple foods for the hungry. The actual contributions come from the site sponsors, who have display ads on the site. The more people click, the more money gets sent to America’s Second Harvest and Mercy Corps. Seems like a good idea. Can’t do any harm anyway, right? Since the site went up in 1999, five other ones have been established using the same model â€" Breast Cancer, Child Health, Literacy, Rainforest Protection, and Animal Rescue. The sites are all linked and, with a high speed connection, you can click on all six in less than a minute.

But here’s what I don’t understand. Each of the sites provides daily and monthly statistics on the number of clicks. I assumed that they would all be more or less the same, since they’re all good causes and it’s easy to go from one to the next. But no. Last August, when I looked into this, the two most popular sites were the Breast Cancer and Animal Rescue, with around 166, 000 clicks per day. The Hunger Site was a distant third at 109,000. Even further back were Rainforest (77,000), and Child Health and Literacy (71,000 each).

What’s going on here? I know some people are crazy about animals. I like them myself. But couldn’t any more than half of them click on Child Health or Literacy while they were in the neighborhood? I don’t want to tell people what issues should concern them, but I sure would like to know what accounts for these differences.

Mike