GoDaddy

Not only is Go Daddy a Super Bowl advertiser, but they are also sponsoring a sweepstakes that will send someone to the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. The prize includes the following: a trip for two to Indianapolis (airfare), two tickets to the game, three nights in a local hotel, and transportation to and from the game. The sweepstakes is valued at $12,000.

According to the official rules  of the Super Fan Sweepstakes, “to participate in Go Daddy’s “Super Fan” sweepstakes (“Sweepstakes”), you must navigate to the designated page on www.facebook.com/GoDaddy and “Like”  the Go Daddy Facebook page, and then complete the specific entry form that includes your name,  telephone number and email address, and agree to these Official Rules.”

There are a whole bunch of other  eligibility  rules (like US residents only), so check them out before entering. People can enter to win the sweepstakes through January 4, 2012, and the drawing will be held on January 9, 2012. The Super Bowl will be played on Sunday, February 5, 2012 – right after DomainFest.

There is no cost to enter the sweepstakes and no purchase necessary, but you do need to give permission to the application on Facebook to sign up. Also, this isn’t a paid or sponsored post… just want to pass this info along.

First off, I want to be very clear in stating that I am ardently opposed to SOPA as it is currently written, and I think anyone who makes a living online should be opposed to SOPA right now. In fact, I met with a US Congressman a couple of weeks ago, and I told him that was the most important issue I wanted to discuss with him when we met.

That being said, I think some of the headlines about Go Daddy losing massive amounts of domain names and/or customers are borderline ridiculous. Take for example a headline that was on DrudgeReport.com yesterday, linking to the article at Techi.com. The article title was “GoDaddy lost 72,354 domains this week. It’s not enough.”  The author appears to attribute this large loss of domain names to GoDaddy’s original support of SOPA, which it later retracted.

While 72,000 lost domain names in a week sounds like a huge number, especially when you take the revenue figure into consideration, it really isn’t all that significant when you look at previous weeks. According to DailyChanges.com, during the same week last year, Go Daddy lost over 86,000 domain names:

• 12/18 – 11,715
• 12/19 – 11,444
• 12/20 – 9,542
• 12/21 – 10,312
• 12/22 – 20,688
• 12/23 – 11,658
• 12/24 – 10,895

As  Mike Berkens mentioned, you need to keep in mind that not everyone uses the DomainControl.com DNS, so these numbers may not entirely reflect the actual changes that have occurred. However, the same could be said about last year’s numbers as well.

I think it’s pretty appalling that GoDaddy would publicly support a bill that many technical and Internet experts say will cause major problems for companies that operate online, even if they did retract that support later. However, reports indicating a mass exodus of domain names at GoDaddy (or a widespread boycott) seem  erroneous to me based on a historical look at the data that others are citing.