How Ecosia generates income to drive impact

Wondering how we finance our mission of regenerating the planet? While a lot of people believe Ecosia is a charity, we actually consider ourselves as a not-for-profit or a social business, with a solid business model which generates income to support our project partners all over the world. This article gives an overview of how we make money to finance climate action and plant trees where they are needed most.

In case you are interested in finding out how our money is spent each month visit our financial reports.

Advertising on Ecosia Search

Like other search engines, we make money when people click on the ads shown above our search results. Unlike them, we dedicate our profits towards climate action. 

When you click on those ads, Ecosia earns a portion of the revenue from its search providers. Our search partners are Google and Bing sell advertising space in different sizes and with different reach. We generate the majority of our revenue by placing their ads next to relevant search results.

Ecosia pools 100 % of that revenue into a fund, ready to allocate across a portfolio of projects.

Sponsored links: partnershops on Ecosia Browser

Sponsored links on the Ecosia Browser are links to partner shops that contribute money to Ecosia’s planting projects whenever you make a purchase from them. You can find out more information about Sponsored Links in the feature description.

The Tree Store

Through the Ecosia Tree Store, people can buy trees to support specific projects in our portfolio. We offer different packages: trees for wildlife, trees for climate action, or the impact bundle to support a range of projects. 

The money we make from sales on the store is added to our tree fund and allocated to the projects across our portfolio.

freetree-extension

To help you plant trees while shopping online, Ecosia introduced freetree. Freetree is a Chrome browser extension that lets you plant trees while you shop online - with just one click. 

The freetree extension will give a notification when you are shopping in one of our many partner shops. As soon as you have added the freetree extension to your browser, freetree automatically shows you which shop you can plant free trees with. Here is an example: Let’s say you surf the net and go a partnershops page. Then freetree will appear all by itself and give you the option of planting trees with your purchase - with just one click.

So far, we have over 40.000 partner shops, you can find the full list of all freetree partner shops here. Online Shops that want to be part of freetree can reach out to freetree.info@ecosia.org.

You can find more information as well as a list of FAQs on the freetree website.