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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

Important to know: Ecosia only receives money if you click on ads. It doesn't get any if you merely display them, and even less if you block them.

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I don't know if they still do this, but not long ago they used to try and get you to switch off your ad blocker with an obnoxious message saying "Ads plant trees! We’ve detected that you are using an ad blocker. We plant trees thanks to income earned from ads. Please disable your ad blocker for Ecosia so that we can keep on planting."

As a counter-argument, is it not a little obnoxious to use Ecosia with your ad-blocker turned on?

What's the point of using Ecosia if not to help them fund-raise for their environmental projects? Why not use Google or Bing directly (with an ad-blocker) and save the Ecosia the bandwidth costs?

You're right. I don't use it, and I don't promote it. But I don't think it's very clear to everyone who does that Ecosia needs you to click ads. Many environmentalists are also anti-consumerists, and I suspect would hesitate to use or promote this search engine if its reliance on advertising were made clearer.

I guess it's quite a difficult thing to communicate without encouraging users to click on ads, which presumably would get them in hot water with the ad networks.

no point in using it if you block ads?

Yes that's true. But you know how on YouTube you only receive ad money after you have a certain number of views? And the more views the bigger the % of ad revenue? Bing Ads is the same

Indeed, but with the typical HN audience that has a higher anti-ad bias than the rest of the population, I was thinking it was important to remind that merely switching to Ecosia will not totally help them

I tried Ecosia for probably 2-3 weeks. It is awful, correction, bing is awful. The ads are totally not related to my search and my search results are much worse than Google. Had to uninstall it.

hmm, they get money although you block the ads? Really?

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