Happy spring! The Obama administration has announced its intention to help craft & ratify a “robust” climate change treaty by December. This is GREAT news.

We have gotten a lot of great feedback in the last couple of days as more and more people start to use Green. Thank you so much, and please keep it coming!

Among the comments we have received, there has been some concern that Green may siphon ad revenue away from website publishers. The issue many folks have pointed out is that when Green shows an ad on a website, the website itself does not have an opportunity to show an ad of its own in that ad space. They fear that will mean the website publisher will lose money.

Please rest assured that publishers will not lose money. Our software does indeed replace ads on websites, but our service is just getting started. We currently only replace a very small percentage of the ads we detect on each webpage — just enough to test our system and make sure it works. The vast majority of ads you see when Green is installed today are therefore the same ads you would see without Green installed, and the revenue from those ads is going directly to the websites they appear on. We currently fund the environmental projects we support out of our own pockets.

Longer term, we have designed our system so publishers can earn more money from ads, not less. Publishers are a crucial part of the online world. They create all the wonderful content you and I enjoy online. We intend to do everything we can to help them thrive.

With that in mind, in the coming months we will be introducing our Partners Program, which will provide publishers an ongoing revenue stream. We think the program will be very popular. We are still working out the details, so stay tuned for further announcements. If you have suggestions for how the program should be structured, or you are interested in hearing more about it when it is available, please let us know (affiliates@inferknow.com).

In addition to the Partners Program, we will also make it possible for publishers to opt-out of the Inferknow system entirely. We are confident that publishers in our Partners Program will earn more ad revenue than they do today. However, we also recognize that many publishers do not want to bear the risk of a new and experimental revenue stream. If a publisher chooses to opt-out, Inferknow will never serve an ad on their site, no matter what. If you are interested in this option, please also let us know (affiliates@inferknow.com).

Thanks again to everyone for your thoughtful feedback, and please keep it coming (feedback@inferknow.com).

We just received email from Mozilla that Green has been made public on the main Mozilla add-ons website. This is exciting news, because now it will be even easier for people to help fight global warming.

Thank you so much to the Mozilla reviewers who helped us through the review process. They have a difficult job and they are all volunteers. Thanks in particular to the two reviewers who reviewed Green in detail. Their helpful comments have made Green better software, and that’s great for the whole Green community.