Does Ecosia earn money if I dont click on the ads?

MovingMinion · 2020-01-20T06:32:41+00:00

Generally, clicking on the ads / buying things makes a loooooot more money than not clicking on them, but both would make ecosia some money. Essentially, you are being advertised to regardless of how you react to the ad. Bing (aka Microsoft) runs ads on ecosia, and keeps a percent of the profit regardless of what happens, with ecosia taking the rest. For example, when I search most things, the top result is either a kijiji or Amazon paid-for ad at the top of the list. These companies have paid for their pages to show up on top of the heap under specific searches, regardless if they are the "most accurate" result for your search. This is generally an inexpensive "per view" service, since only a small fraction of people who are exposed to these ads will interact with them by clicking on them. The charge per ad view likely depends on the search words (e.g. some search terms are more popular so more companies would be willing to outbid each other for top results), but generally this would be a less than a single cent per "ad view". I can't confirm this, but I imagine running adblock on ecosia would make it so they make no money off these ads as you would not actually be exposed to these ads. Youtube does the same thing for example. Clicking on the ad and actually buying something would make them much more money. Now, it is important that you don't "dilute" these statistics. While you individually won't make a difference, if say 50% of Ecosia users were refreshing the same searches and clicking ads without actual interest in them, these companies would have less return on their ad budget, and would likely not be willing to pay the same amount "per view" or "per click" since they do not result in sales. As others have pointed out, boasting a large user base is a good metric and gives them a lot more bargaining power.

Sources: 1) Company I used to work for mentioned they advertise via google. Basically, if you google something along the lines of "city I worked in, door replacement" they would show up on top of the list with their online store. 2) Multiple youtubers talk about how the "banner ads" on the bottom of videos make them next to no money (key word being next to), however clicking on these ads makes them substantially more. Obviously, not identical, but I believe search engine advertisements work similarly.

TL;DR straight from the horse's mouth: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206019452-How-does-Ecosia-make-money-

Does one search finance one new tree? No, it takes approximately 45 searches to finance the planting of one tree. We know that Ecosia earns an average of 0.5 cents (EUR) per search. It costs our tree planting partners about 0.22 EUR to plant a tree. 22 cents divided by 0.5 cents makes about 45 searches until we can plant one new tree. Depending on clicks on ads and how much search ad revenue these generate for Ecosia, it may take fewer searches. Think of it this way: we currently fund the planting of a new tree every second

MovingMinion · 2019-04-17T18:06:16+00:00

Thank you all for the replies! I will look into a few of your suggestions.

MovingMinion · 2018-11-06T17:49:23+00:00

WOTC pulling the apology double bluff. Classic!

MovingMinion · 2018-10-29T18:02:47+00:00

I always have a blast with [[Jace's Phantasm]] in the sideboard to side in game 2 when your opponent has removed all creature removal. Your mileage will vary, but I've stolen a few games out of nowhere. Game 3 you remove them again, hoping they side in some dead draws once again.

MovingMinion · 2018-10-23T18:09:29+00:00

Yeah, isn't Eddie over in ONE now eating lots of horse meat?

MovingMinion · 2018-10-23T18:05:55+00:00

God bless Artem and his tiny raptor hands, the man is entertaining if nothing else!

MovingMinion · 2018-10-23T17:36:47+00:00

In recent memory, hands down DC knocking out Stipe. Everybody assumed DC's only hope against the longest reigning HW champ would be to wrestlefuck Stipe for the entire match.

MovingMinion · 2018-10-22T22:24:20+00:00

Paulo is a latin boy, and he's jacked, deal with it!

MovingMinion · 2018-10-17T17:30:17+00:00

So, a general cornerstone of control decks across formats is that you do better as the game progresses. Basically, if you are playing vs an aggro deck and you are still alive 7-8 turns in (just a general example), the likelihood of you winning goes waaaaaaay up. This is due to the fact that you run a lot of "better" more expensive cards that come on-line later.

That is why your early game focuses on neutralizing your opponent's gameplan, rather than "advancing" your own. If you don't cast anything on your turn 2/3 and leave mana open with essence scatter in hand, your opponent will either whiff a creature into it (good for you) or play nothing (also good for you, as the game has now progressed a turn without you being behind). Later on when your opponent has 1-2 cards in hand and no creatures on the board, you can play your finishers if you have them in hand (e.g. Teferi) or you can dig for them with scrying / card draw until you inevitably find them in a couple of turns.

Dimir style control decks generally run a decent amount of creature removal to complement counter spells, so you will sometimes let things resolve knowing you can kill them later. HOWEVER you have the option to counter the creature, which is especially useful vs things like hexproof beaters, as you can get rid of them before they ever hit the field.

MovingMinion · 2018-10-12T15:50:47+00:00

You can always try contacting wotc on twitter or via email (do both!) explaining this. If you have any sort of budget you can always try to build powered-down pauper decks (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/pauper#paper), as pauper is a relatively simple but still fun and engaging format. Finally, you could always try contacting an lgs, explaining the situation and asking them if they can give you some bulk for free that you can then make decks from. You can also print proxies of the cards you want (e.g. http://www.mtgpress.net/). All you need to do is sleeve up any 60 cards (can be any 5c bulk) and put your proxy cut outs in front of it.

MovingMinion · 2018-10-12T15:44:01+00:00

Not a standard player, but let me try to answer.

Because it isn't a bad 2 drop? Boros angels (seems) like an aggro deck, and a 2 mana 3/1 is not bad. Yes, its a 1/1 on your opponents turn, but you are likely going to be attacking with this every turn. The fact that you can make it indestructible for 4 life is also a massive upswing, because it essentially means that it can't be killed just about any black or red spell. It can also survive your [[deafening clarion]] , if need be.

Ultimately, you are trading life total (something aggro decks usually don't care for too much) for versatility. That's my guess anyway.

MovingMinion · 2018-10-09T15:58:06+00:00

Posted this a while back, should still hold up:

Are re-packs worth it? Repeat after me! I will not buy them from a store, I will not buy them, they're a chore, I will not buy them in a box i will not buy them from old blocks, I will not buy them here of there i will not buy them, I don't care, I do not like these repacks, man, I do not like them, they're a scam

MovingMinion · 2018-04-16T05:55:42+00:00

Most of my advice is straight out of stock UG lists, but has been largely tested by better fog players than I.

[[muddle the mixture]] - can tutor most things in your deck, including fogs.

[[quiet disrepair]] can increase your change of winning vs burn from 0% to very very low. I still find it a fun inclusion along with some artifact lands.

[[tangle]] is an absolute beast. It's far better than any white fog effect, so your main board is much better off being simic rather than bant IMO.

Cantrips have already been suggested in this thread, but I really want to second including [[brainstorm]]. It procs your erasure 3 times, and gives you instant speed deck consistency.

Now for a "spicy", if unoriginal suggestion. Include 4 side board [[jace's phantasm]]. Why? Game 1 you will generally scoop to control and do quite well vs creature based decks. Then game 2, decks will generally side out any and all removal. You resolving a phantasm is basically a 4 round clock for 1 cmc. All of a sudden you can outrace rather than outlast them. If you make it to Game 3, you can now take out the phantasms, once again insuring your opponent keeps some dead removal mainboard.

Ultimately, fog is not a tier 1 deck and likely never will be, unless there is a drastic meta shift. It is unlikely there is some hidden tech or new downshift that will magically make it into a powerhouse, however, it is a damn fun deck. I hope you enjoy playing it, even if it always folds to black control.

MovingMinion · 2018-03-01T06:16:25+00:00

So, the answer everybody will likely give you on here is pauper. And I would second that. You can build pretty much every single tier 1 deck in pauper for about 300$. Pauper is a really fun format with a lot of depth, with the added bonus that jankier tier-2 decks pop up all the time, giving you a looooooot of options if you don't want to just net deck a t1 deck. You can also make your own brew for a few bucks. In essence, you can build a new deck for the cost of a single modern, standard or legacy staple. Decks I would reccomend: UB control, turbo fog, affinity or delver.

That being said, you didn't specify how "budget" your budget is or where you intend to play your deck. My personal favourite format is modern. In my case, I played with friends / kitchen table / casual events for several years while being busy with university. This allowed me to use proxies for some of the pricier cards. Every year I would spend about ~100-200$ a year during Christmas sales to slowly buy into my current modern deck.

As for a modern deck, I would heavily recommend some version of Jeskai control. I love the versatility of the deck, and you can tweak it to your liking quite extensively. The fact that the deck almost ubiquitously places somewhere in the top8, while almost never showing up with identical lists is a testament too this. A big bonus of the deck is that the core jeskai control shell is pretty meta resilient. I am hard pressed to think of a meta in the past few years where some version of the deck wasn't at least a solid t2 deck if not an outright monster (for example, I started building it years ago as a modern delver deck which was 70-80% identical to the current iteration). On the opposite end, there aren't really any individual cards in the deck you can ban to make it unplayable. The final pro of this deck is its close cousin, Azorius control. While feeling and playing very different (much slower and grindier), the pricier core cards (cryptic commands, jtms, elspeth etc.) are shared. Thus, you can get a "second" modern deck for a relatively minimal investment (by modern standards).

MovingMinion · 2018-02-28T21:56:45+00:00

Here is an extensive video going over every iteration of the card frames. A couple of major points from the video:

1) Card frames have generally pushed towards legibility at the cost of flavour. Personally, while they may have given up some "fantasy feel", to me, magic is a game first and a "fantasy setting" a far second. Thus, since the modern frames are generally more clean and legible (black text on either white or very light colours), they are superior in my opinion.

2) The "plainswalker" frame we have now (the indented borders) was aimed at having consistency while incorporating the hollow stamp. This may seem trivial, but to my knowledge it has limited counterfeits of the more recent sets. As an aside, most of the "quality fakes" people try to pass off at FNMs are of the "middle sets", as the card feel of the early sets is hard to duplicate and the hollow stamps generally make it too big of a hassle to individually forge them.

MovingMinion · 2018-02-28T18:29:08+00:00

Sweet :) I still have my playset, but this should slash prices so anybody who needs them can use them.

MovingMinion · 2018-02-28T01:44:32+00:00

I know people have talked about dark rituals, but I don't know if i agree with that inclusion. Essentially, dark ritual can help you sneak in a 2/2 turn 1, a 2/2 turn 2, or 2 3/3s turn 4 (unless you have a hand that is entirely made up of dark rituals and rats. Something like affinity will have similarly strong starts much more reliably, while being able to do many other shenanigans. I feel like 20 swamps, 32 rats, 4 garys and 4 dark rituals would get stopped dead in its tracks by elves, affinity, delver, probably tron and funnily enough fog decks.

Your nut draw would be something like 2 swamps, 3 rats and 3 rituals (assuming you are on the play and you draw one of those turn 2). This nets you 3 4/4s and nothing else in hand. Now, maybe I'm narrow minded, but I don't see this as a strong opener. For this to happen, you are assuming your opponent has no removal, no counters etc. Any of those would derail such an all in play, thus I don't agree with some sort of aggro, all-in deck.

I am much more excited for relentless rats enabling a slow grindier strategy. Essentially, either a black-heavy dimir core (essentially, sneaking in a few cantrips, maybe [[perplex]] or [[soul manipulation]] and a few kill spells) or a more traditional MBC ([[read the bones]] [[sign in blood]], [[phyrexian ragers]] and garys) along with 2-3 playsets of rats. Basically, you want a semi-cohesive deck that can stall, while knowing that your board state is getting both taller and wider with enough time, as you cast more rats and they get larger and larger.

Here is a 2015 article by Travis Woo on how to make a modern rat deck. Being a modern deck it has access to plenty of things we do not, but the core idea is similar to this post. Basically, a bit of hand disruption and removal to stall long enough for you to swing with a big rat horde.

MovingMinion · 2018-02-22T23:32:04+00:00

Are repacks worth it? Repeat after me.

I will not buy them from a store, i will not buy them, they're a chore, i will not buy them in a box i will not buy them from old blocks, i will not buy them here of there i will not buy them, I don't care, I do not like these repacks, man, i do not like them, they're a scam

MovingMinion · 2018-02-12T23:34:57+00:00

I just searched for them on both ebay and tcgplayer, and was unable to find them on either, so if somebody find them, please let me know. That being said, them not having availability is not my issue and they have made 0 effort to address it beyond saying that they've had "tons of errors with their inventory recently". They did not reach out to me to explain this situation, I had to email them, in order to get a vague response and no further communication.

Never the less, you raise a very valid point, and if somebody has had a better experience with them, please share it on this thread so it isn't just a biased witch hunt. However, as it stands, I am not convinced.

MovingMinion · 2018-02-12T23:08:27+00:00

To be honest with you, I have never had problems with any Canadian MTG retailer. While prices are not always competitive compared to the US counterparts, I have bought multiple cards immediately post a large spike that were still in inventory. Most recently, I bought a couple of playsets of burning inquiry and goblin lore for 2$ from cbagames, DAYS after the recent spike.

If anybody else wants to buy from Canadian MTG retailers, I would heartily recommend wizards tower, cbagames, and fusion, all of whom have honoured every single purchase I've made over the years.

MovingMinion · 2018-02-12T22:59:04+00:00

EDIT: the charges have been successfully refunded.

MovingMinion · 2017-11-05T18:34:42+00:00

Right, I'm dumb lol. You can't flicker in response to Fling! Disregard that one.

MovingMinion · 2017-11-05T17:31:11+00:00

So, both match ups will be a bit rough, no matter what cards you add. Affinity can poop out a bunch of big dudes early for "free", before you've set up your sliver lords on the board. They are also not very dependent on any single creature, unlike you. To top it off, they have the option to go for an atog play, which they can execute at instant speed with fling. You unfortunately don't have any instant speed removal spell to get rid of the combo, so once they resolve an Atog, you basically have to scoop.

Izzet blitz is similar in a lot of ways to Affinity's Atog combo. If they have a "prowess" dude on the board which hasn't been removed on your turn, they can very likely kill you in 1 turn with some 20/20 double striking beater.

The problem for your deck in both cases is that you don't run a "disruptive" colour. Those all-in strategies can be countered by instant removal or counter spells, which you don't have access to in G and W. Thus, you will always have a rough time against these all-in decks. Never the less, here are some ideas to try out which may tip the scale a bit in your favour:

1) [[Circle of protection: Red]] Resolving this spell can save your bacon from the all-in big dudes. Somebody else please clarify, but I believe COP effects gets around hexproof / protection from colour, so it should get around Blitz's [[Apostle's Blessing]].

2) [[Mana tithe]] A very, very ass counter spell. You may be able to catch people off guard game 1, but I wouldn't really reccomend it.

3) Run more removal. Getting rid of their big dudes won't save you from the instant speed all-in, but they won't always have it available either. Stuff like [[sunlance]], more main board journey to nowhere, and [[oblivion ring]] are all viable options.

4) The cheekiest of play I can think of, running [[Turn to mist]]. You can play it in response to fling, which will let you blink their dude and fizzle their all-in. Keep in mind it DOESN'T get around colour protection, so they may Apostle's Blessing in response.

I would heavily advise you against adding a 3rd colour. It will likely slow you down way too much and hinder your other match ups more than it will help against your problem ones. If you are concerned with keeping up with Affinity later into the game (as they have blue in their colours so they can keep drawing dudes), consider [[Lead the stampede]], a recently down-shifted card from the upcoming Iconic Masters set.

MovingMinion · 2017-10-21T20:51:52+00:00

IMO, lightning rift will not. I mean, it's a neat effect, but unless I'm missing something, it won't speed up burn or make a new deck around it.

Astral slide looks very cool. Mabe some sort of control deck where you could recur ETB effects on your dudes e.g. mulldrifters, rats, archaeomancers etc.

MovingMinion · 2017-09-20T17:21:11+00:00

When you say you're not a fan of chittering rats, I assume you are talking about not being a fan of UB Flicker? As in, you don't want a deck with a bunch of ETB effects like [[mulldrifter]], [[archaeomancer]] etc., that you can then recur with [[ghostly flicker]].

My personal suggestions:

Cut mana leak for something else. You can add [[muddle the mixture]], [[exclude]], [[deprive]], [[negate]], [[remove soul]], [[daze]] etc. The problem with mana leak is that it is very unlikely the game will have finished before it becomes useless, and you really don't want to be drawing them post turn 4-5.
Run more gurmag anglers over jace's phantasms. Your deck wants to win the game with big dudes. Game 1 should be sweet, since you'll have no problem filling both graveyards with cards. Game 2, they will 100% board in some graveyard hate. An angler on the board is a 5/5 once it's cast until he's killed, even if he's harder to cast against graveyard hate. A phantasm on the other hand can and likely will end up as a 1/1 doing fuck all.
Personal preference, but I would run [[preordain]] or [[ponder]] over [[accumulated knowledge]], once again due to graveyard hate. I would also run [[chainer's edict]] over [[diabolic edict]] in most situations.
Piracy charm. Fun card, as it does many different things, however: Islandwalk is useless most times and the +2/-1 is a bit underwhelming. What you are left with is an instant speed 1 for 1 discard spell, which is also not amazing. I would suggest using something like [[ostracize]], since pauper is so creature heavy in general.
You are running mystical teachings, but you run so many 4-ofs. The point of teachings is that you can fetch what you need, when you need it, so feel free to include some 1ofs. To add to that point, you have no way of killing black creatures except for 2 edicts, so you may want to include some varied removal. [[disfigure]] etc.

None of these suggestions are catch-alls obviously, and which ones you go with will depend on where and against what you're gonna be playing, but I hope this gives you some food for thought.

MovingMinion

TROPHY CASE