Stories

SDG 15: Plant trees while you search the web with Ecosia

Ecosia is like any other search engine, with one major difference: they use their profits to plant trees.

16.04.2020.

How does Ecosia make money?

Like any other search engine, Ecosia earns money from clicks on the advertisements that appear above and beside the search results.

The advertisements on Ecosia are clearly labeled as Ads and are text links to websites that pay for each click by users. The ads are delivered to you by our partner Bing, who pays Ecosia a share of the revenue generated via these ads.

Ecosia earns a few cents for every click on an ad from Bing – or a portion of the purchase price made through an affiliate link. Ecosia then gives the profits from this ad revenue to planting projects.

We also make a small income on commission from our online store. All profits we receive go towards our projects – which means we can plant 20 trees every time we sell a t-shirt.

How it all started?

Ecosia was founded by Christian Kroll, Ecosia's CEO, in December 2009. Christian studied business administration in Nuremberg and decided to travel the world for some inspiration on a business model with a positive social impact. He visited India and Thailand and finally decided to stay in Nepal for a while to establish “Xabbel”, a local search engine that was supposed to help generate funds for local NGO projects. With an average of only four hours of electricity per day, Christian soon had to abandon "Xabbel", but the idea for a search engine with a positive impact stayed with him. Christian carried on traveling and set up camp in Argentina for a few months. He learned a lot about reforestation projects in the Atlantic Rainforest in Argentina and Brazil and also read Thomas L. Friedman’s book “Hot, Flat and Crowded”.

Ecosia is born 

It taught him a lot about the connection between globalization and climate change and how planting new trees could actually neutralize CO2 emissions on a big scale. This is when Christian realized he wanted to engage in forest preservation to help the environment. He came up with the idea of a search engine that helped finance planting and restoration projects. In late 2009, the idea for Ecosia.org was born and the tree planting search engine launched in December of that year. It is a Berlin-based social business owned by Christian Kroll and Tim Schumacher. To learn more about the folks behind the scenes, click here.

Texts by Ecosia. Find out more on their website and start planting trees while you surf the internet by using Ecosia!