Imagine if Google Donated 95% of its Profits to Charity!

Oct 5, 2021

Here at SearchScene, we make money from search ads, just like Google. However, unlike Google, we donate at least 95% of our profits to charity. We retain just 5% of our profits, which is enough to ensure that we have enough in savings for a rainy day and that SearchScene can remain in business in the long term. You can keep up to date with our charitable donations here.

How much money does Google make?

Google’s parent company is called Alphabet. Alphabet’s revenue for the twelve months ending 30 June 2021 was $220.265 billion, a 32.67% increase year-over-year. Alphabet’s gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2021 was $122.738 billion, a staggering 36.52% increase year-over-year.

How much of this is from Google Ads?

Alphabet doesn’t just make money from search ads, it also makes money from YouTube advertising (as it owns YouTube) and Google Cloud, as well as other services. However, the vast majority of its revenues and profits come from its search ads. Unfortunately, we could not find a breakdown of Alphabet’s profits that showed how much of its profits were specifically from Google Ads. However, in 2020, advertising revenue from Google’s search ads was $104.062 billion and revenue from its search partner networks was $23.090 billion, totalling $127.152 billion. This constituted 70% of its total revenue of $181.694 billion for that year. Here are the figures. If we assume that the proportion of its revenues from search ads is the same as the proportion of its profits from search ads, then that would mean that approximately 70% of Alphabet’s profits are derived from search ads on Google and its many smaller partner networks.

So let’s assume that roughly 70% of Alphabet’s profits of $122.738 billion are from search ads, which equates to roughly $86 billion in profits from search ads.

What if Google donated 95% of its profits to charity?

If Google donated 95% of its profits to charity, that would amount to roughly $81.7 billion each year! In fact, as Google’s profits seem to be increasing by around 36% each year, this number would only increase with each passing year.

Instead of going to Google’s shareholders, imagine how that money could be spent differently: tackling extreme poverty; digging wells; feeding the hungry; planting trees; dealing with the effects of climate change on the most vulnerable; and lobbying governments to cut carbon emissions, safeguard existing rainforests and adopt greener policies.

As an example, $81.7 billion per year could be used to:

Reforest an area the size of the Amazon rainforest (estimated at 390 billion trees at a cost of approximately $39 billion, assuming a tree-planting cost of $0.10 per tree). This number of trees could be planted not just once, but every single year!

End world hunger. A recent 2020 study by Ceres2030, which was backed by the German government and reported by The Guardian, estimates that the cost to end world hunger within 10 years would be around $330 billion, which works out at $33 billion per year. (This is not far off the $30 billion per year previously estimated by the UN, as reported by The Borgen Project).

This would still leave $9.7 billion to spare, which could be spent in any number of ways. For example, it could be used to provide:

133 million life-saving malaria treatments (at a cost of $2 billion)
19.8 million water hand pumps (at a cost of $1 billion)
5.7 billion polio vaccines (at a cost of $1 billion). This would be more than enough to eradicate polio.
2.4 billion measles vaccines, enough for 1.2 billion children (at a cost of $1 billion)
66.7 million blankets (at a cost of $1 billion)
55.6 million shelter kits (at a cost of $1 billion)

…and you would still have $2.7 billion left over, which could help WWF lobby governments to adopt greener policies and save the polar bears and countless other endangered species from extinction.

However you choose to spend it, the bottom line is that you could solve a lot of the world’s problems with $81.7 billion (or more) every year!

It is worth noting that SearchScene’s ads (which are provided by Bing) do not generate the same revenue as Google’s ads do. This is because most advertisers flock to Google, as that’s where most users are. This drives up competition between advertisers on Google, which in turn drives up the cost of advertising. However, if more and more people switch to SearchScene, the advertisers will surely follow and our revenue from advertising will increase proportionally.

Why doesn’t SearchScene use Google Ads?

For anyone wondering why SearchScene doesn’t use Google’s more lucrative ads instead of Bing’s ads, the answer is that Google won’t let us. In fact, Google will not allow any search engine that advertises itself as charitable to become a search partner, because apparently “this language can draw undue attention to the ads“!

So you can keep using Google and help make Google’s shareholders even richer, or you can switch to SearchScene and help save the living planet!

Click here to add SearchScene to your browser or to install SearchScene on your phone or tablet.

*Prices and exchange rates were correct at the time of writing in October 2021, but may have changed slightly since.