Ecosia, the tree-planting search engine powered by Microsoft’s Bing, has announced that it will be using revenues from people’s searches next Tuesday to fund tree planting and other initiatives in the United States, Brazil, and Australia to restore areas decimated by wildfires. The trees will not only recover the areas but provide more resilience against future wildfires.
Ecosia’s business model is fairly simple, people browse the web and are shown a few ads at the top of the search results just like Google and Bing do. The revenues that Ecosia collects from these search engines are then largely investing in tree financing. In May 2021, Ecosia’s income was €2,181,020 and €1,133,436 was spent to finance 1,713,195 trees. The rest of the money went to green investments, taxes and social security, advertising its product, and operational costs.
Commenting on what’s happening, Joshi Gottlieb, Ecosia’s content lead, said:
“On July 27, we’ll dedicate all of our profits to wildfire action around the world. Your searches will help us kickstart a new project in California, scale our restoration efforts in Australia, and fund local firefighters in Brazil.”
This is not the first time that Ecosia has dedicated an entire day to funding specific projects. After weeks of fires in Australia, Ecosia announced in January 2020 that it was giving revenue raised on January 23 specifically to tree planting in Australia. This resulted in Australia getting 26,446 trees just from one day’s efforts.
If you’re interested in helping out next Tuesday (July 27), just switch your browser’s default search engine over to Ecosia – doing this is supported on most popular platforms. All you need to do is search the web as normal and then Ecosia can start collecting revenue. It should go without saying, do not click on ads you’re not interested in as this will only harm the initiative.
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