Ecosia
Ecosia's logo, which includes a doodle of Earth.
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Type of site
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Private company |
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| Available in | English and 26 others |
| Owner | Ecosia GmbH |
| Created by | Christian Kroll |
| Revenue | 1.7 M€ (2016) |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 2,855 (December 2016[update])
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| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | 7 December 2009 |
| Current status | Active |
Ecosia is a web search engine based in Berlin, Germany, which donates 80% of its surplus income to nonprofit conservationist organizations, with a current focus on tree planting. As a "social business", Ecosia is a CO2-neutral company that supports full financial transparency, and is certified by B-labs as a B-corporation.
Ecosia's search results are powered by Bing and Ecosia's own search algorithms. Like many other search engines, Ecosia shows ads next to its search results. Ecosia is paid by their partners at Microsoft Bing for every click on a sponsored link for having directed users to their advertisers.
How much Ecosia earns per click on an ad strongly varies, depending on the competition on the keyword and the value of what is being advertised. Some search terms like "credit", "bank account" or "solar panel" come with more lucrative ads than for example "chocolate" or "sticky notes".
In general, a click on one of the more lucrative keyword ads may finance multiple trees at a time, others may finance a fraction. Taken into account that not every Ecosia user clicks on an ad every time they search, Ecosia states that every search raises around 0.5 Euro cents. It takes about 56 searches (0.28 EUR) to fund planting of a single tree (consulted on December 1, 2016). Additionally, in the FAQs the company assures that "algorithms [are] active, which are designed to detect fake clicks and invalidate them".
Ecosia also raises funds through its second product EcoLinks, a Browser Extension that allows users to donate for free to Ecosia through their online purchases. Operators of online shops pay a commission to Ecosia (usually a rate something between 2 and 10%) if a user lands on their shop through clicking on an EcoLink and purchases an item or any service.
Ecosia supports country-based country filtering but does not support the displaying of worldwide information as of July 2016.
In September 2009, Ecosia received $21,500 in seed capital, and the search engine launched on 7 December 2009, to coincide with UN climate talks in Copenhagen. Over time, Ecosia has donated to different tree-planting programs. Until December 2010 Ecosia’s donations went to a program by WWF Germany that protected the Juruena-National park in the Amazonas. In order to make sure the protection was kept up, the program also drew up and financed plans with timber companies and the local communities.
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