Kerfuffle Doesn’t Hurt Go Daddy’s Business — Elephant Shooting

Controversy doesn’t have noticeable affect on domain registrar’s business.

Was Bob Parson’s elephant hunting video a stealth PR move?

Maybe a little bit, but given that he posted a similar video last year and nary an elephant lover noticed, I’m not sure how he could have predicted a different result this year.

But one thing’s for sure: it hasn’t had a significant negative impact on Go Daddy’s business.

I’m been tracking DailyChanges.com over the past week to see if there were any noticeable business effects. This is a loose way of looking at registrations as it tracks nameservers instead of domain registrations, but it’s still a good proxy.

Nothing unusual has happened. No massive outbound transfers.

I asked Go Daddy to confirm this and they confirmed that yep, there’s been no significant impact on business.

There has actually been one impact — Go Daddy’s Video.me site has served up over 700,000 plays of the video.

That the uproar hasn’t caused much damage doesn’t surprise me much. Despite mainstream media attention the typical Go Daddy client has no idea regarding the elephant shooting. And most of them wouldn’t be outraged enough to figure out how to transfer a domain name.

This isn’t to say that Parsons would do everything the same again. Following all, he belatedly edited his hunting expedition video to focus less on the invigorating hunt and more on helping villagers.