My thoughts on the top 10 results on Beacon

After launching nearly 4 years ago, Beacon has been used over 100,000 times!

For what started as a personal tool, I’m amazed that it’s grown to this level and even becomming a part of the development process for some agencies.

But onto the top ten.

URL	CO2	Rating	Count
https://digitalbeacon.co/	0.026	A+	1075
http://google.com	0.223	B	352
https://youtube.com	1.075	F	327
https://facebook.com	0.103	A	174
https://www.instagram.com/	0.837	B	128
https://www.apple.com	0.689	C	102
https://www.nagotkommunikation.se	0.164	A	88
https://www.fidelity.co.uk	0.632	D	83
https://amazon.com	1.472	F	80
https://wholegraindigital.com	0.102	A	75

As you can clearly see, the Beacon homepage itself is tested the most by far, more than 3 times the second result and surprisingly has the hightest rating.

What’s interesting is that 3 out of the top ten are reports for organisations (or extensions of them) that are considered small, either solopreneurs or less than 25 employees. Six are FAANG companies - which are Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet (fomerly known as Google) and represent the 5 largest tech firms in the world. As an aside, I’m surprised to learn that Microsoft aren’t a part of this group anymore. The report for Fidelity is the only outlier here given that it has around 9,000 employees and works within the financial sector and yet doesn’t talk about digital sustainability at all on any of their platforms, yet has been tested 83 times!

The average emissions for the top 10 is 0.532g which gives a rating of D - while there are 6 results that are rated better there are two F’s that bring down the rating drastically. This figure is less than half the average of all results which is (currently) 1.203g which gives a rating of F, unsurprisingly.

Not sure whether I need to go deeper look at the top 100 or top 1,000 and even start to categorise them to help gain more insights - maybe when it gets to 200,000 tests.