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The tech blog TechCrunch alerted us to the controversy surrounding Ecocho, an Australian-based search company that claimed it would plant “up to two” trees for every 1,000 searches. Google just terminated its advertising partnership for what were, at the time of the TechCrunch posting, unknown reasons. The company is now left with Yahoo! as it’s sole search provider and advertising partner. Since this is Earth Day (or it was), the response to the post was, perhaps, more spirited than you’d expect. After more than 40 comments, the debate more or less ended with a link to a story in an Aussie paper that explains Google’s position:
Google’s policy is that publishers running Google advertising must not “compensate users for viewing ads or performing searches, or promise compensation to a third party for such behaviour”. By promising to plant trees, Ecocho broke those rules.
The basic reasoning is that users might be compelled to click on ads just to plant the trees, which amounts to click fraud. We pointed out a similar quandary with Dank Apps on Facebook. But Ecocho isn’t the first green search. Blackle.com positioned itself as an energy-saving version of Google, simply because the screen was black. However, according to this same article, “that claim was proved false by extensive testing, which found the power saving benefits were negligible or non-existent. Like Ecocho, Blackle profits from advertisements appearing next to search results.”
The consistent theme is that companies of all types are devising ways that consumers can vote for climate solutions and other worthy causes with their wallets, whether through shopping, searching, or other commerce-driven behaviors. The flip side is that companies are devising ways to simply cash in on eco-guilt. In principle, though, these are worthy objectives and business models. They just require a fair measure of caveat emptor.
Other services like EcoSeek, GreenYour, and GreenMaven offer green search as a central feature in the context of a broader value proposition.
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1 Ripple Effect: Fight Poverty with Every Click | Max Gladwell // Jun 5, 2008 at 11:04 am
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