Free wine hidden in website’s small print finally claimed after three months

Founder adds clause as experiment to see if people really read terms and conditions

A free bottle of wine, promised in a non-profit website’s fine print, was finally claimed after three months by someone who read the terms and conditions, the founder said.

Tax Policy Associates, a tax-focused non-profit organisation, added a line into their terms and conditions section in February as an experiment to see if people actually read the small print.

“Our ongoing experiment into whether anyone reads website T&Cs continues. We put this in our terms back in February. Just got claimed,” Dan Neidle, the founder of the organisation, said.

The prize was hidden in the middle of a bullet point that read: “We will send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this.”

Mr Neidle told BBC that the person who spotted the hidden passage within the terms and conditions "kind of cheated" because they read it to write their own policy, taking examples from other websites.

He did a similar experiment when he first launched the organisation over two years ago and it took four months at that time before it was finally spotted.

"We did it again to see if people were paying more attention and they’re not," he added.

Tax Policy Associates added the clause in February (@DanNeidle)

The clause that offered free wine has now been updated.

It said: “We know nobody reads this, because we added in February that we’d send a bottle of good wine to the first person to contact us, and it was only in May that we got a response.”

He said he was inspired after he saw a similar experiment by the rock band Van Halen which asked, via a clause embedded in their tour rider, for a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed.

“It was a brilliant strategy to see if people were paying attention,” Mr Neidle said.