Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)
67 comments
·March 10, 2025dwedge
fadesibert
I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder...
There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.
So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).
That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.
That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)
Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.
So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.
Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.
HenryBemis
> That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee
If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.
I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.
Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.
stavros
No, but it aligns with the interests of the consumers better if you're actually targeting consumers (for the recurring revenue) rather than burning cash to get as many users as you can lock in, and then selling to someone who will milk them when they have no option.
HunOL
Yes, but opposite of "maximizing profits" does not automatically imply targeting consumer or better product. In this example they state that they interested in maximizing amount of tree they plant. Cool, good for them, but it's not something I'm interested in when using a search engine. After one of Vivaldi's recent updates, I was asked to try Ecosia as my default engine, and I did, but after a few days I went back to Google.
dwedge
That's true, but the product can still get worse chasing revenue from those consumers.
stavros
Hm, I've seen this line of argumentation a lot, and I'd like to name it as a fallacy. It's basically "perfect is the enemy of the good", where one good action is dismissed because it's still not perfect.
The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
zbyforgotp
They can do the milking without selling - don’t they?
stakhanov
FWIW: They have provisions in their bylaws (which can only be changed with the assent of their public interest asset-locked shareholder) that restrict salaries to a level that's commonplace in the industry specifically in Germany. In Germany, software engineers and managers tend to make a lot less than they do in the U.S., certainly not an amount of money that's a meaningful tradeoff for giving up rights to dividends and other distributions.
__alexs
Yes avoiding another Mozilla situation should be a high priority for anyone interested in this area in future.
motbus3
I would love to see it too. Also relations with for profit companies as well.
But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?
I honestly have no idea
ghaff
In the US, the CEO/executive director of a mid-size non-public company would probably expect a few hundred $K/year. Which isn't starvation wages, especially by European standards, but is something a lot of individual contributors in Silicon Valley would consider a relative pittance. And toss in no equity.
null
MattGaiser
Even if the CEO makes a million a year, it is a pittance compared to the potential equity value of a tech company.
jksflkjl3jk3
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?
andy12_
Because ad revenue can be used for the non-profit? Ecosia's whole thing is that when you use it, you indirectly help plant trees - "the search engine that plants trees".
jksflkjl3jk3
Do they disclose what percentage of their revenue is donated?
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.
scarfaceneo
You can donate to an organisation and use their search engine.
MrToadMan
You can explore the amount paid out to projects by month, region and partner projects in those regions here: https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...
panstromek
yea, I could't figure out what's the idea either.
aswerty
I really like the idea of Ecosia and Steward Owned companies, but as somebody who wants out of the Ad game completely, uses uBlock Origin religiously and pays for services like email and search. I haven't actually used Ecosia, but am interested in others experiences with it. But I imagine in the HN crowd a lot of other people fit the same profile as myself.
dmbche
You pay for search and email? What services do you use? May I ask you why, if you're wanting to go into it?
Toutouxc
In my case it's Kagi and Fastmail. Fastmail primarily because I don't want to support Google and Kagi because it's genuinely better than the alternatives.
robin_reala
Kagi and Soverin for me. I bailed from GMail after the AMP-in-mail proposal,[1] and EU hosting was a bonus; ended up blogging about my choice back in 2018.[2] If there was a good EU equivalent to Kagi I’d be definitely interested.
[1] https://blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmai...
[2] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
stavros
Not the GP, but I pay for Fastmail because it's just so much better than Gmail, and I pay for Kagi sometimes because it's generally better than Google.
iregina
How is Fastmaol? Is it inconvenient to not use Gmail?
dwedge
I wish more people would self-host email. Email getting centralised to a handful of providers is no good for anyone.
dwighttk
I stopped self hosting when my host got blacklisted and I lost about a year of emails with my grandmother… I just thought she was reading them but not having the energy to respond but when I visited at Christmas I saw that all my emails were in her spam box.
aswerty
Fastmail and Kagi. And I'm very happy with both.
dotcoma
I pay for Tuta (tuta.com) for email.
The only paid search engine I know is Kagi (kagi.com)
iglio
Kagi and Proton here
rcMgD2BwE72F
Fastmail and Kagi. The former is amazing – Gmail UX and speed is atrocious in comparison, and the latter is amazing to find reliable, to-the-point results.
stakhanov
Does anybody happen to have a pointer to further research this "Steward Owned company" legal structure? Since they're based in Germany, I assume this is a translation of a German legal term of sorts, but I couldn't find the original or anything that would let me learn more about it.
blankton
It sounds like a gGmbH, but the Imprint (https://www.ecosia.org/imprint) still says Ecosia GmbH (-> For-Profit).
stakhanov
I looked up the bylaws just now (mostly because I'm procrastinating). It looks like they have a gGmbH that owns 99% of the shares (by number of shares), but founders retain 99% of the voting rights. Founders' shares are barred from receiving dividends, and the gGmbH has veto rights in relation to any certain changes that would fundmentally alter this ownership structure.
nbadg
Something I don't really understand, maybe you have thoughts: is there a benefit to gGmbH over the company being a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Stiftung?
onli
https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ gives an impression if you click through to the company descriptions, they tend to explain what is meant. Otherwise the term seems to be understood in English, there is a wikipedia article that seems correct to me. Or was that one missing the information you seek?
stakhanov
Thanks for the pointer!
conaclos
Does anyone use Ecosia every day? How does it compare with DuckDuckGo and Qwant?
mixedmath
I've been using it as my primary search engine for a couple of months. It's not great as a search engine. I find their locality of search to not be well-supported (e.g. the search "food near me" works good in google and not great in ecosia).
Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.
It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.
rhodescolossus
They just use Bing and Google Search https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...
mrweasel
Yes, I haven't used Qwant though. I'd say it's pretty equal to DuckDuckGo, maybe a little better after they started mixing in Google results. Generally speaking I do think that the Bing powered search engines does much better than Google, but Ecosia had a few specific searches where it's would fail me, that's gone now.
mapt
We have legal structures with which to make statements like this about nonprofit status, structures which bind the promise so that we don't have to take your word on it.
guhwhut
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jasoncartwright
Ecosia have been going a while, and I don't want to be that guy 'just asking questions', but...
Is there some sort of independent verification of the trees being planted and their impact? I wonder if there is a study into the effect of their interesting green reinvestment setup vs a traditional for-profit businesses (Google is the obvious example) and their environmental impacts.
slevis
This is my main problem with Ecosia as well. I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.
MrToadMan
It seems they are also diversifying their investments into other climate impact projects like solar (see some of the projects here: https://blog.ecosia.org/climate-projects/).
modo_mario
Yeah, I've got similar worries since there has been plenty of greenwashing that has happened with planting trees. I'd be sad but also not surprised if some of those trees being planted are sitka spruce wood plantations or so.
reify
I have and still use Ecosia Daily.
Its a search engine, the same as all the other search engines.
Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia.
Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company.
Ad revenue is then used to plant trees
you cant complain about that
hoseja
Trees don't need planting.
Trees need a safe place to grow without saplings getting destroyed.
But trees absolutely don't need planting. Besides, a healthy forest has to go through pioneering stages first.
guhwhut
[dead]
goodpoint
> Shares can’t be sold at a profit or owned by people outside of the company. No profits can be taken out of the company.
It it a worker-owned coop then? If so, why not calling it that?
aswerty
The model they use is relatively well known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership
My personal experience with this model boils down to: you make a company and a charity. Where the charity owns special share categories in the company.
You can then have other share types for founders and investors. These share types can essentially be bought out (e.g. an investor share can be bought for 5x of it's initial value, say, allowing for investment with a 5x cap). Essentially allowing the charity to gain full shareholding at a certain point. But there is no requirement to have these other share types - but they are useful drivers to get the company off the ground.
Obviously this type of investment isn't something traditional VCs care for; other more philanthropic oriented sources are required.
shafyy
No, that alone does not make it a worker-owned coop.
notachatbot123
Ecosia has an AI Chat now. Showing that they are not about saving the environment, but it is all just shallow, bullshit, greenwashing marketing.
3OCSzk
AI has gotten cheaper and it will be even more in the future. This will eventually break even, comparing the cost of conventional web search vs AI on some cases. It is not the same as bitcoin where it requires more energy to get less value
slevis
... because AI Chats are consuming more energy than search? This is a flawed argument. Internet search also started out using more energy than looking up things in your local library, so maybe we should go back to that?
There is no way around increased AI usage. Would be great if Ecosia plays a key part in its adaption to balance it with environmental goals.
I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO.
You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be taken away from you.