Previously, the organization directed only 80% of its revenue towards reforestation programs. While such efforts can benefit ecosystems where the trees are planted, botanists have warned that if such reforestation efforts are badly managed, they can harm the environment more than benefit it. These reforestation efforts would be focused on Brazil and Burkina Faso. On 3 June 2021, Ecosia announced Ecosia Trees, a service allowing other companies to buy trees at 1€ each that Ecosia would then plant and maintain. Ecosia ended up meeting only 10–12% of the goal by 2020's end. In 2015, a blog post on the company's website announced its intention of planting one billion trees by the year 2020, calling the idea 'ambitious' but worthwhile. īy 2011, the search engine had raised over €250,000. To protect this area, the organizers drew up and financed plans with timber companies and local communities. Until December 2010, Ecosia's funds went to a WWF Germany program that protected Juruena National Park in the Amazon basin. Over time, Ecosia has supported various tree-planting programs. History Įcosia was launched on 7 December 2009 to coincide with UN climate talks in Copenhagen. Plans call for 80% of the company's profits to go to Ecosia's global reforestation projects.

ĭebit cards produced by TreeCard are made of British cherry wood instead of the customary plastics found in most other debit cards. It planned to launch a new debit card in 2021, in partnership with Mastercard.

In October 2020, Ecosia announced it had bought a 20% stake in the debit card company TreeCard. In April 2021, Ecosia handled 0.4% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.5%, Bing's 2.9%, and Google's 93.2%. In March 2021, the 82-person company spent only €73,000 on servers and software, compared with €381,000 on personnel costs. Ĭooperation between Ecosia and Microsoft benefits both companies: Microsoft makes a small profit via Ecosia, which presumably takes customers away from Google, and Ecosia can keep its investment in infrastructure small through the use of Bing's existing implementation.

The €789,113 expenditure for March 2021 amounted to 80% of that month's would-be profits. Kroll told Handelsblatt he's not allowed to reveal the exact percentage. When someone clicks on an ad in Ecosia, Microsoft earns money, according to Kroll, but Ecosia gets a large portion of the sales. Users entering a keyword in Ecosia essentially see the same results as via Bing, including the ads. In a May 2021 Handelsblatt article, example figures from March showed revenues of €1,969,440, while the largest expenditure was 'Trees' at €789,113, ahead of the second-largest expenditure, operating costs, at €543,425. As a result, Kroll and Ecosia co-owner Tim Schumacher gave up their right to sell Ecosia or take any profits out of the company. In October 2018, founder Christian Kroll announced he had given part of his shares to the Purpose Foundation. Business model Ĭhristian Kroll (2019), founder of EcosiaĮcosia uses 80% of its profits (47.1% of its income) from advertising revenue to support tree-planting projects. A single search on Ecosia raises approximately half a Euro cent (0.005 EUR) on average, according to Ecosia's FAQ. Ecosia shows advertisements next to its search results and is paid by partners every time a user is directed to an advertiser via a sponsored link. Įcosia users conduct over 10,000 searches every minute. The company states in its privacy policy that it does not create personal profiles based on search history or use external tracking tools like Google Analytics. Searches are encrypted and not stored permanently, nor is data sold to third-party advertisers. In 2018, Ecosia committed to becoming a privacy-friendly search engine. Įcosia's search results have been provided by Microsoft Bing since 2017. Ads were delivered by Yahoo! as part of the revenue sharing agreement with the company. At launch, the search engine provided a combination of search results from Yahoo! and technologies from Bing and Wikipedia.

Ecosia careers