Ecosia

Ecosia is a search engine based in Berlin, Germany. It donates 80% of its profits to nonprofit organizations that focus on reforestation. It considers itself a social business, is CO2-negative and claims to support full financial transparency and protect the privacy of its users.[4][5]

Ecosia
Type of site
Search engine
Available inEnglish and 27 other languages
CEOChristian Kroll
Revenue28M€ (2021)[1]
URLecosia.org
CommercialYes
Users15,000,000[2][3]
Launched7 December 2009 (2009-12-07)
Current statusActive

Ecosia is B Lab-certified, meeting its standards of accountability, sustainability, and performance. As of December 2021, the company claims to have planted more than 140 million trees since its inception.[6]

Search engine

At launch, the search engine provided a combination of search results from Yahoo! and technologies from Bing and Wikipedia. Ads were delivered by Yahoo! as part of the revenue sharing agreement with the company.[7]

Ecosia's search results have been provided by Microsoft Bing since 2017,[8] and enhanced by the company's own algorithms.[5] Ecosia is currently available as a web browser extension or as a mobile app on Android and iOS devices.[6][9]

In 2018, Ecosia committed to becoming a privacy-friendly search engine. Searches are encrypted and not stored permanently, nor is data sold to third-party advertisers. 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.[10]

Ecosia users conduct over 10,000 searches every minute.[11] 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. A single search on Ecosia raises approximately half a Euro cent (0.005 EUR) on average, according to Ecosia's FAQ,[12] taking about 0.22 euro (€)[12] or, as of August 2021, 1.3 seconds to plant a tree.[2]

Ecosia has become the default search engine at a growing number of European colleges and universities, including Glasgow, Leeds, Lincoln and Sussex in the United Kingdom[11] and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.[13]

Business model
Christian Kroll (2019), founder of Ecosia

Ecosia uses 80% of its profits (47.1% of its income) from advertising revenue to support tree-planting projects.[14][15][16] The rest is put into backup reserves for unforeseen circumstances – if these reserves are not used, they are channeled back into the company's tree-planting fund. The company publishes monthly financial reports on its website.[17] In October 2018, founder Christian Kroll announced he had given part of his shares to the Purpose Foundation.[18] 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.[19][20]

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. Users entering a keyword in Ecosia essentially see the same results as via Bing, including the ads. When someone clicks on an ad in Ecosia, Microsoft earns money, according to Kroll, but Ecosia gets a large portion of the sales. Kroll told Handelsblatt he's not allowed to reveal the exact percentage. The €789,113 expenditure for March 2021 amounted to 80% of that month's would-be profits.[21]

Cooperation 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. In March 2021, the 82-person company spent only €73,000 on servers and software, compared with €381,000 on personnel costs.[21]

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%.[21]

Investments

In October 2020, Ecosia announced it had bought a 20% stake in the debit card company TreeCard.[22][23] It planned launch a new debit card in 2021, in partnership with Mastercard.[24]

Debit cards produced by TreeCard are made of British cherry wood instead of the customary plastics found in most other debit cards and which take so much longer to decompose when discarded.[23][24] Plans call for 80% of the company's profits to go to Ecosia's global reforestation projects.[23] It is estimated that every $60 (or £45)[24] spent using the cards will allow one tree to be planted.[23] There will also be an option to only use the digital card using online payment services Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.[25][23]

History

Ecosia was launched on 7 December 2009 to coincide with UN climate talks in Copenhagen.[26] Over time, Ecosia has supported various tree-planting programs. Until December 2010, Ecosia's funds went to a WWF Germany program that protected Juruena National Park in the Amazon basin. To protect this area, the organizers drew up and financed plans with timber companies and local communities.[27]

By 2011, the search engine had raised over €250,000.[28]

From July 2013 to September 2014, Ecosia donated to the Plant a Billion Trees program run by The Nature Conservancy, a program to restore the Brazilian Atlantic Forest by planting one million native trees by 2015.[29]

In 2015, Ecosia began funding reforestation in Burkina Faso as part of the Great Green Wall project, backed by the African Union and the World Bank, to prevent desertification.

According to Ecosia, by 2015, the search engine had almost 2.5 million active users and had planted more than two million trees.

In May 2015, Ecosia was shortlisted for The Europas, the European Tech Startups Awards, under the category of Best European Startup Aimed At Improving Society.[30]

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.[31] Ecosia ended up meeting only 10–12% of the goal by 2020's end.[32]

Ecosia's servers have been running on 100% renewable energy since 2018; Ecosia has been expanding its solar energy plant to cope with the increasing number of users on their search platform.[33]

On 9 October 2018, Ecosia offered €1 million to buy the Hambach Forest from German energy company RWE AG to save it from being cut down for lignite mining.[34] RWE declined the offer.[35]

On 23 January 2020, following the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, Ecosia donated all of its profits from that day to ReForest Now, a local NGO that not only plans to restore the forests, but also "make the area more resilient against future fires".[36] They stated that the profits were used to plant 26,446 trees.[37][38]

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.[39][40][41] These reforestation efforts would be focused on Brazil and Burkina Faso.[39] 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.[39]

Impact

The company works with multiple organizations, such as Eden Reforestation Projects, Hommes et Terre, and various local partners, to plant trees in 16 countries throughout the world.[42][43] Ecosia currently has at least one project in the following countries: Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Morocco, Nicaragua, Peru, Philippines, Rwanda, Senegal, Spain, Tanzania, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States.[44]

By July 2020, Ecosia had surpassed 100 million trees planted in total, resulting in over 50,000 metric tonnes of CO2 being removed from the atmosphere each month.[45][46][47][48] It was reported in the same month that Ecosia, on average, was able to fund a tree planting every 0.8 seconds – averaging 75 per minute or 108,000 per day – with the revenue it makes from advertising.[47]

Ecosia has stressed that it is not only carbon-neutral but carbon-negative. Combining its tree-planting initiative with investment in solar energy to power its servers (running on "200% renewable energy"[3]), each search is said to remove 1 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere.[3][49]

Ecosia has been a certified B Corporation since April 2014.[50][51] The company's B-Impact Score was 113.4 on a scale from 0 to 200, an improvement over 2014 and 2016 scores of around 98.[50] B Lab, the organisation which certifies B Corporations based on areas such as employment, community issues, and the environment, said that as of August 2021:

"[In] donating 80 percent of its ad revenue, the search engine has raised almost $3 million for reforestation projects since its founding in December 2009".[50]

An article in Ethical Consumer examined Ecosia and its relation to it search provider, Bing. Giving Ecosia an "Ethiscore" of 11, in contrast to Google (5.5) and Microsoft Bing (6.5), Ethical Consumer found Ecosia to be superior to the other search engine companies it looked at, but marked it down in seven categories for its relationship with Microsoft (the lowest scorer in those categories).[52] Ethical Consumer made a point of clarifying that it's not the actual searches which lead to tree planting, but the click-through of search engine users to the ads, and called for improved transparency concerning its relationship with Microsoft Bing.[52]

One transparency measure taken by Ecosia is the publishing of its monthly business reports on its website, with a six-week delay.[53][54]

Browser integration

Ecosia is available on Google Chrome,[14] Firefox,[15] Safari,[55] Microsoft Edge,[56] and other browsers as a default search engine by downloading the extension from the Chrome Web Store or Mozilla's Addon site, among others.

As of 26 January 2016, with its version 26 release, the Pale Moon web browser has included Ecosia as its default search engine, as has the Polarity web browser since its 8 release in 15 February 2016.[57] Ecosia also briefly was the default search engine of the Waterfox web browser starting with version 44.0.2.[58] And Vivaldi has included Ecosia as a default search engine option since its version 1.9 release.[59] In March 2018, Firefox 59.0 added Ecosia as a search engine option for the German version.[60][61]

As of 12 March 2020, Ecosia was included as a default search engine option for Google Chrome in 47 markets, the first time a not-for-profit search engine appeared as a choice to users.[62] On 14 December 2020, Apple's Safari web browser added Ecosia as a search engine option in macOS Big Sur 11.1 and iOS/iPadOS 14.3.[63] On 28 January 2021, Ecosia became an official search engine on the Brave browser as a result of a partnership announced that day by both companies.[64][65]

On 12 August 2019, Ecosia announced it would not participate in the "search-choice" auction to appear on Android devices led by Google.[5] This meant that in 2020, European Android phone users did not have the option to set Ecosia as a default search engine. Christian Kroll explained the boycott decision saying, "We're deeply disappointed that Google has decided to exploit its dominant market position in this way. Instead of giving wide and fair access, Google has chosen to give discrimination a different form and make everyone else but themselves pay, which isn't something we can accept".[5]

Ecosia on Campus

Ecosia on Campus is a global community of students who share a common goal of making Ecosia the default search engine at colleges and universities.[66] The campaign initially began at the University of Sussex, when three students persuaded their university to make the switch,[67] and Ecosia subsequently become the default search engine at a number of European universities, including Glasgow, Leeds, and Lincoln in the United Kingdom,[11] and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.[13] As of September 2021, 20 universities had made the switch, financing the planting of over 140,000 trees.[68] Currently, there are ongoing projects across different campuses aiming to make Ecosia the default search engine.

See also

References
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