Ecosia is a B lab-certified search engine that donates 80% of profits to NGOs that work in reforestation. The company claims that it has planted over 125 million trees since its launch in 2009. As of writing this article, the search engine has 15 million users worldwide. While the search engine helps in reforestation, it also focuses on its users privacy. With doing such big feats, it makes us question how they do it. Here's how Ecosia works -

Share of ad revenue

Ecosia currently provides search results from Bing while also being enhanced by the company. Bing also provides ads with a revenue sharing agreement between both companies. While the percentage of cut is not public, the company claims it enjoys a higher share. The company then uses these profits to fund NGOs around the world.

Carbon negative

In 2020 Ecosia revealed that it was producing twice the energy required to produce all search results using solar panels the company built in Germany. While company also enjoyed being carbon negative with every tree, they plant as trees can remove 50Kg of carbon in their 15 years of lifetime. This is a huge achievement making the search engine more carbon negative.

Financial Transparency

Being B Labs-certified, the company maintains financial transparency with users. Every month they publish financial reports on their official blog. The reports also shows that they not only invest in trees but also green investments.

Privacy

As Ecosia does not use external tracking tools nor does it sell user data. While every search is encrypted according to the company, the ads are shown using relevant keywords.

Unique competitor

Ecosia is a unique competitor enjoying rising users every year. This makes other competitors to innovate more towards carbon negativeness. As more and more search engines are pledging to go carbon negative in upcoming years. Providing healthy competition towards other companies, we may see the rise of more companies like Ecosia in the future.

Afterwords

Ecosia is one of the most successful social businesses out there making an impact daily. If Ecosia can make such an impact, imagine what big corporations can do if they give even a small percentage of their money to make a big impact.

P.S - I hope you liked this article this is my first attempt, I will try writing more articles to improve.