You may or may not have heard of Ecosia, the new eco friendly search engine that uplants trees with the profits it makes. Is it legitimate? Is it a opportunistic venture that takes advantage of the climate culture that exists at present? Lets discuss.
If you’ve been around the internet of late and have maintained a healthy interest in the green movement and sustainability or the environment, you may have seen ads about Ecosia. You may have some questions though. What are they really about, and do they actually do good? Heres the skinny on the green search engine from Berlin, Germany.
- Whilst they leave the statement on the ads as “we plant trees with our profits, its not all of their profits. The company promises to actually use at least 80% of its profits from any and all ad revenue for planting trees around the world.
- Ecosia does provide full transparency by publishing proof of all of their financial support.
- Ecosia guarantees the quality of its results through the search technology it gets from Bing while being supplemented and enhanced with Ecosia’s own unique bespoke search algorithms.
- They will always be a CO2-neutral web search which means that Ecosia neutralizes all carbon emissions that are related to your web searches.
But is it actually worth looking at for advertisers? Melbourne SEO Company SearchButlers says no! The market share is just too small. Google search currently picks up about 69% of the market, next is the images tab with about 18%, then youtube rounds out the top 3. Yahoo and Bing make the top 5 with a combined market share of less than 3% and just to give you an idea of the actual tiny slices available 0 Duck Duck Go who may prioritize anonymous search but as a brand certainly are not anonymous take up about 0.35% of the daily sear h market which equates to about 30m queries. We dont know what Ecosia has as a market share but it wont be anything like that so really there is just no available audience that are using the search engine to justify any investment even for businesses who are eco friendly and would think that the Ecosia searchers are of that segmentation.
They may offer a nice gesture towards humanity but for businesses, it probably is just too small a fish in to big of an ocean to be desirable as a search marketing option.