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Sure, here you go: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206019452-How-d...

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.



Somehow the math doesn't add up for me.

If these numbers are to be believed, planting a tree costs maybe 50 cents, max. I am....skeptical.


From the FAQ:

> It costs our tree planting partners about 0.22 EUR to plant a tree. 22 cents divided by 0.5 cents makes about 45 searches until we can plant one new tree.


This charity focuses on tree planting and this page has a breakdown on the costs a bit down the page: https://onetreeplanted.org/pages/about-us


When I planted trees I got around $0.25 per tree. Some of the other companies paid as low as $0.09.


Thank you for pointing this out! This changes how I think about Ecosia.

EDIT: grammar


Out of curiosity, how else were you thinking a search engine would be making money?


Maybe by impressions only. But I think these days are long gone.




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