![]() "For us, it was a great symbol of the options for the future," Kroll explains. The fate of the forest is an ongoing political battle in Germany between the energy company, environmentalists and politicians from all parties. Recently Ecosia made national and international news when it offered €1m to buy the ancient Hambach forest in Germany, to save it from coal mining energy firm RWE, which plans to fell most of the trees. "We want to give capitalism's 'invisible hand' a nudge in the right direction." Many of Ecosia's strengths lie in its dynamism, ambition and vision, most often found in the capitalistic startup sector, yet the team wants to do things differently. "We’re not interested in maximising profits: our ultimate goal is to build a greener and better world for everyone," explains Kroll. No profits can be taken out of the company. Shares cannot be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company.Ģ. ![]() ![]() "We looked at co-operatives, foundations and B-Corps, but finally settled on the fairly new model of a ‘self-owned company’," explains Kroll.Īs a self-owned company, Ecosia operates as a typical company, except there are two significant distinctions:ġ. Yet it has decided to move in an entirely different direction. With over 7 million users and rapid global growth, by normal standards of the Internet economy, Ecosia would now be a company worth tens of millions of euros. Ecosia even goes as far as to publish its monthly financial reports publicly. The search engine also prides itself on its transparency and has pages and pages dedicated to informing its users of how it works and what it does. Kroll says the company likes to say its current core audience is "young people who give a shit" and that the up and coming generation is more likely to be eco-conscious because "they are the ones who will suffer the most under the effects of climate change and environmental damage." Using these sources, it is aware that most of its users are from Western Europe, primarily Germany and France, and are young. One example is their financing of PACTO Mata Atlântica, an organisation made up of 300 different tree-planting projects, all of which are trialling different methods of saving the rainforests of Brazil.Įcosia’s current core audience: "young people who give a shitĮcosia uses Facebook to advertise and gain users, which provides lots of demographic data and can find out the global geographic distribution from IP addresses. "We bring an ambitious startup mindset to our environmental work, setting very ambitious goals, testing and experimenting and rapidly scaling what works,” Kroll explains.Įcosia experiments with various environmental projects, testing their impactfulness and trying new tactics. ![]() This is a positive strategic partnership for Bing, as the vast majority of new Ecosia users are switching from Google, allowing Bing and Ecosia to chisel away at Google’s immense market share.Įcosia funds and partners with over 20 tree-planting projects across Peru, Brazil, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Haiti, Colombia, Spain, Morocco, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia. They use Bing's search technology, enhanced with Ecosia's own algorithms to provide their results. Ecosia's search results are powered by an exclusive partnership with Microsoft’s Bing. "We then give the profits from this ad revenue to tree planting projects," explains Kroll. Like every other search engine, Ecosia earns money from clicks on the ads which appear above and beside the search results.
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