As it grows, the possibility of cashing out becomes weightier.
In making their own operation sustainable, Ecosia’s founders foresaw a growing threat: their company’s value. The heavy lifting of operating a search engine is outsourced to a tech colossus. Ecosia pays for its own servers, maintains a browser plug-in and mobile app, and the rest of the team works on marketing and operations. Microsoft does not disclose how many engineers work specifically on Bing, but it’s clear from financial reporting around Bing that the company’s budget is several orders of magnitude greater than Ecosia’s.
Ecosia employs around 25 software engineers. The answer is that Ecosia can collect the profits per click of a major search engine (minus Microsoft’s cut) while spending next to nothing on the technology to create and maintain such a service. How is it that Ecosia has been merrily pumping out month after month in which it brings in at least double its total cost of operating-unheard of for nearly any business-while its technological backbone only recently became profitable? Trees generate their own emissions too.īing, meanwhile, was $1.3 billion in the red in 2013 and only became profitable in 2016.How many trees can we actually plant on available land? A whole lot.Just planting new trees isn't going to get us out of the mess we're in.