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.
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.
If they are planting a million trees a month why "worry" that they might be getting paid, sorry "milking", to do their jobs?
The company is doing the work to earn that money.
Nobody would call it "milking" money if they were a billionaire owned company rapaciously leveraging their trapped customers for every dime. I don't think its the right word to use here.
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.
I see it a lot too, and it's called the Nirvana fallacy [1]. We shouldn't do anything about tax evasion because people will evade taxes anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total amount of tax evasion). We shouldn't ban drunk driving because people will drive drunk anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total number of drunk drivers). We shouldn't trust non-profits, because they seek revenue anyway (ignoring that it's much less severe for any non-profit in comparison to a for-profit company).
> 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.
I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else.
Every company has the option of chasing extra revenue from customers. This company has no other options. Perhaps this makes them better as a company and want to develop a better product so that people naturally want to use it more. Or perhaps they, like so many companies before them, try to see how much they can milk out of their userbase before they lose it.
They also aren't immune to costs around them. If their office rent goes up, or power for their servers costs more, they have limited options. Reduce wages (unlikely), do less good, or get more from users.
> I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else.
I said the product will be better for me. I generally believe that things are better for me when they're trying to entice me versus when they're trying to entice someone who isn't me, but we can debate that, if you want.
I agree with you that it's usually true, I just don't agree that it has to be true. When a company is well funded and focusing on userbase, that's great. When they need more money, it might not be. I know they are totally different types of companies, but look at social networks - when they are expanding they are good for everyone, once they decide it's time to earn more money from their exist users (focusing on the user) that's when it gets worse.
In Ecosia's case it's different I think - without accounts and nothing keeping you there, every customer today is a customer that needs enticing again tomorrow.
The problem with social networks is that they decide to earn more money from advertisers by selling the users. I don't know how a company can say "I'll only ever want a specific kind of customer", but at least saying "I'll never want to sell" is a step in that direction.
