The highly anticipated boycott of GoDaddy that occurred yesterday went out with a whimper instead of a bang. The boycott encouraged people who had their domains registered with GoDaddy to transfer them to other providers due to GoDaddy’s support of SOPA, the controversial bill that is currently being shopped around on Capitol Hill. The boycott was spearheaded by popular online community site Reddit. The participants and bullhorns of the boycott hoped to bloody GoDaddy nose by creating a mass exodus of domains from the service, effectively putting a dent in the domain registration company’s profits. What ended up happening was quite the opposite.
According to DailyChanges, a service that tracks domain registrations and transfers across companies, GoDaddy actually gained 20,000 domains. The number of domains transferring away from GoDaddy was 14,492 but the number of transfers in was almost double that number at 27,843. In terms of domains deletions, 35,907 domains were deleted from GoDaddy compared to 43,304 new registrations.
In the recent days GoDaddy publicly reversed its stance on SOPA to curb the Internet backlash it was facing, which may have attributed to the failure of the boycott. Realistically speaking, the outrage on GoDaddy’s SOPA stance was mostly contained to those tech savvy enough to know what SOPA is, its implications, and those who actually deal with things such as online domains. A large quantity of people who do use GoDaddy are not savvy in such issues and know only of GoDaddy because of the Danica Patrick commercials. To them, the controversial issues of the Internet are made known to them only if they snag a spot in their daily newspaper or nightly news. I have never used GoDaddy because I know that other, cheaper, more reliable registration services exist out there. The average domain owner is not that well versed in technology.
However, just because the boycott failed doesn’t mean that GoDaddy is in the clear. The negative publicity it garnered has in fact damaged GoDaddy’s reputation, and the effects might possibly be long term and long lasting. GoDaddy knows this which is why it is scrambling to save face but the Internet has a very very long memory and this debacle will be on the minds of many people when their domain is up for renewal or they are considering to snatched up a new domain.
Source: Tech Dirt
This is discouraging, but not surprising. Like you stated, Callas, GoDaddy is the most well-known domain registrar because of its commercials. A huge amount of people not in the tech loop use them, and therefore probably haven’t heard much about the controversy. I wish some local news stations would’ve picked up the story (maybe they did, and I just didn’t hear about it).