It’s Christmas Eve. I don’t have time to be posting to this blog. But I opened Techmeme up on my phone and saw this headline from The Next Web: “Go Daddy lost 21,054 domains yesterday in wake of SOPA PR disaster”
Here’s a quote…
It looks like these PR moves to save face, and business, are completely futile. According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,167, not taking future renewals into account. The day before wasn’t a good one for the company either, with 15,000 people taking their domains elsewhere. That means that even though Go Daddy changed its stance, people have had enough.
The stats from DailyChanges show that the transfers away from Go Daddy have been increasing all week.
Sounds really bad doesn’t it? So I went to the DailyChanges website and I noticed a couple of things TheNextWeb neglected to mention…
So almost as many people transferred in as transferred out and there were more new domains created than old domains deleted.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not suggesting people joined GoDaddy because of their SOPA support. I’m simply saying the 21,000 number is probably close to an average amount of in/out transactions for GoDaddy. In fact, I made a quick visit to the WayBackMachine and took a look at September 9th (the closest I could get to “this time last year”). I found 15,001 for transfers out and 15,876 for transfers in. A relatively similar ratio (there are more transfers out in the current numbers but that’s not surprising since the SOPA protest could easily have caused a couple thousand transfers out).
May 14th, 2011 is the next record in the database and it has 10,704 (In) and –15,455 (out).
So don’t be misled. The SOPA protest almost certainly had some impact but it isn’t as dramatic as the headline would lead you to believe. I’m not going to outright accuse TheNextWeb of skewing the story but I did note their source (TheDomains) noted the “Transfer In” numbers while TheNextWeb did not.
Addendum: Just to further make the point here is a list of the Transfer In/Transfer Out numbers for the week leading up to the Reddit post that encouraged a boycott. And yes, that is 46,000 out transfers that happened days before the SOPA list was published.
(The numbers are from DailyChanges but I believe you need a subscription to access them)
12/16 23,762 / 21,783
12/17 21,762 / 46,958
12/18 18,901 / 14,998
12/19 16,825 / 8,836
12/20 17,285 / 13,143
12/21 16,232 / 14,493
12/22 18,095 / 15,860