Their website is confusing. So it's a non-profit for planting trees.. that's also a search engine? How are those two things at all related or have any benefit to being combined into one company?
If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated as its goal when it's incorporated.)
[1] https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
They are very transparent about it. They list the amounts paid, the partners, the tree species, etc.
They are also fairly efficient from what you can tell by their reports.
As somewhat of a sympathizer of effective altruism (the idea of efficiency being an important factor in charities, not necessarily the implementation and even less the community), this isn't super appealing to me.
Who doesn't? Why else would one make money other than to do something with it?
If they didn't make money, how would they support the tree-planting?
This just seems like a donation with complicated extra steps, in the same way that e.g. "rounding up to charity" or even "round up savings" do not appeal to me at all.
That might well be an idiosyncratic preference, and to some the idea of "planting trees via running web searches" might appeal much more than a nonprofit search engine that donates to a basket of charities, or one that directly pays the user for showing them ads and lets them decide what to do with the money and then the user donating the proceeds themselves.
If it's just a token amount, then I'd rather not support a marketing gimmick and would prefer to just donate directly to an organization focused on trees. If it's a significant amount, then it seems unlikely that they'll be able to compete with for-profit alternatives that can focus on developing the best product.
Ecosia is profitable, they take some percentage of that profit and use to plant trees. In a "normal" company that money goes straight into the pockets of the company owners. Profit is measured after investments into R&D, salary, marketing everything that come with running a business.
Sure they could "just" spend more on developing their product, but from what I can see they don't really need to, it's already a good product. So rather than stuffing the pockets of an owner or shareholders, they donate that profit, or parts of it, to organisations that plants trees. Most people wouldn't donate to a tree planting organisation, but they will switch their search engine, if it's good enough and even if that plant only 100 trees, that's better than no trees.
I worked for a company that spends it's profit on helping sick children. The owners make enough money. They donate over €1.000.000 per year to a foundation, rather than putting that money into the pocket of the owners. The customers might not even know that they support that foundation, but that also doesn't matter as long as they get the products they want and the price they want. Your suggestion is that the owners should pocket that cash, and I should go donate to that foundation directly?
Only if the company returns money to its shareholders (ex: pays a dividend or does a stock buyback). Many growth-focused companies don't do this -- Amazon didn't do it for its first 22y, Google for its first 17, Netflix for 24, etc.
What has the lower barrier of entry: making a point to donate your money, or switching your default search engine?
https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
So where is your fault?
They're also now partnering with Qwant to build their own independent search engine index!