Less than two months ago, the Internet was embroiled in a heated battle to stop acts like SOPA and PIPA. At the time, the loyal users of Wikipedia urged the foundation behind the site to shut down for 24 hours in protest. As we all know, it did just that.

Following up on another promise, the foundation behind Wikipedia has started to remove its domains from Go Daddy’s service. The news was slipped into a February engineering report:

Domain names — The Wikimedia Foundation has started to move its domain names from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor (announcement).

The announcement that it links to is from Wikimedia’s Jay Walsh on February 13th that said:

Hi folks – you may have seen some media coverage recently about Wikimedia’s intentions around GoDaddy. It is true that WMF is still planning to move 100% away from GoDaddy for all of its domain name services.

I’ve been informed that we’re currently working with MarkMonitor to carry out a full switch-over, which as many of you will appreciate, takes time. WMF is going to post to the blog and generally share this information as soon as the process is complete. Until then, it does mean that you’ll see in some of our DNS registrations that GoDaddy is still listed. We’re working on it :)

Thanks – and stay tuned for more news in the next week.

The foundation again has stayed true to its word, and even though Go Daddy backed off of its support of SOPA immediately, the whole situation apparently left a bad taste in Wikimedia’s mouth.

Score another one for the Internet.

The Wikimedia Foundation wasn’t the only one threatening to leave Go Daddy, as Ben Huh from the Cheezburger Network famously kicked it all off with a tweet. Cheezburger domains appear to have stayed with Go Daddy, as of this moment.

Yesterday was MoveYourDomainDay, and while we don’t know how effective of a boycott it was, we do know that Go Daddy has lost more customers than usual in the past week.

Even though Go Daddy has more domain name transfers coming in than it has going out, the company still wants to remind you that it opposes SOPA every chance they get.

Before you can move your domain, you must unlock it with Go Daddy. When you try to do so, you’re welcomed with a message and link:

The link goes to Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman’s statement from yesterday:

Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

While Go Daddy might be seeing a lot of domains being transferred to it, the ones leaving them can do unknown monetary damage, since it’s not known how many times those domains would have been renewed while managed by Go Daddy.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better for domain registration company Go Daddy. Yesterday, we reported that Go Daddy had reversed its decision to support SOPA. Its customer service reps are even taking to the phones to beg you to keep your domains with the company.

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. Here are the number of domains moving away from Go Daddy this week alone:

Monday (8,800)
Tuesday (13,000)
Wednesday (14,500)
Thursday (15,000)
Friday (21,054)

Just a suggestion, perhaps Go Daddy should write about SOPA and leave the comments open, that way customers can reply. I’m starting to run out of /facepalm photos, so it better do something to repair its relationship with customers.

Oh, and by the way Go Daddy…we know that you’re exempt from SOPA, and that you haven’t even officially changed your stance with Congress.

If you’re not sure what the Stop Online Piracy Act is, read SOPA For Dummies

Sometimes, the Internet wins after all. Yesterday, a day that domain company Go Daddy would like to forget, saw Internet legends threatening to take business away from it and moronic blog posts without commenting. All over its support of SOPA.

Today, Go Daddy has reversed its stance on the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, and no longer supports SOPA.

Here’s what Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman had to say about the change of tune:

Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better. It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.

The company had a lot of egg on its face and has backed down.

Christine Jones, Go Daddy General Counsel, tried to save face by asserting the fact that the company has always backed Internet creators:

Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future

While this is a complete PR move for Go Daddy, it’s an important step towards obliterating SOPA and coming up with rules and regulations that make sense for everyone. If all of the other companies who were listed as supporters do the same, then there’s a fighting chance this thing will get squashed. It’s a good thing that the company didn’t let this go any further, because users were pledging to leave Go Daddy because of its previous stance.

Well, things keep getting more and more out of hand for Go Daddy today. Not only might it lose a huge customer in Ben Huh’s Cheezburger, it published its official stance in support of SOPA and shut the comments off. I was talking to Ben Huh and he suggested in jest that someone come up with a counter to track everyone who is pledging to leave Go Daddy. He agreed, so I tweeted it.

One awesome reader of The Next Web, Michael Schade, responded and came through with NoDaddy:

@thatdrew Done: rawr.mschade.me/nodaddy/

— Michael Schade (@sch) December 23, 2011

The site asks you for your email address, and counts you as someone pledging to yank your domain names from Go Daddy. You’re listed on the right hand side with your gravatar:

Head on over to NoDaddy and support the cause against SOPA and Go Daddy’s stance in support of the act with your pledge.

Hey Michael, maybe should let people list how many domains they’ll take away from Go Daddy so you can show a running tally? We know that Huh’s 1,000 is a good start.

Despite the uproar that followed GoDaddy CEO Bob Parson’s elephant shooting earlier in the year, consumers didn’t put their money where their mouth was: the company has experienced significantly increased sales since March, a Flippa infographic shows.

“Their share of registrations seems to have increased since the shooting, and their share of website sales hasn’t diminished when looked at relative to the rest of the website market. We doubt the event even factored into GoDaddy’s $2.25 billion sale to private equity firms last month!” said Flippa’s Andrew Knibbe in a blog post.

The infographic reveals a decent boost. Before the elephant shooting, the company had a 54% market share of domain registrations and a 58% sales rate.

After the shooting, it has a 62% domain registration market share and a 62% sales rate.

GoDaddy and Bob Parsons got a reaming in social media in the following days, with some commentators assuring us that this action would lead to a massive reduction in the company’s market share, but it seems we have confirmation of the famous saying right here: “All publicity is good publicity.”

Other interesting facts revealed by Flippa’s State of the Website Economy infographic include some insight into the market demand for .co domains. Knibbe says that .co websites have some of the lowest sales rates on Flippa, despite some winds of change that suggested it would soon become a dominant TLD last year.

Popular domain registrar Namecheap.com has today announced that it raised $20,000 for Save The Elephants via a campaign which offered users a special discounted domain transfers in response to a recent video showing the CEO of GoDaddy shooting elephants in Zimbabwe.

The registrar allowed GoDaddy customers to transfer their com/org/net domains onto Namecheap’s servers for just $4.99 per domain, donating 20% from each transfer to Save The Elephants.

It is estimated that over 20,000 GoDaddy customers decided to migrate their domains to Namecheap, earning the company $80,000 for facilitating the transfers in just a few days. Spurred by messages of outrage posted on Facebook and websites, GoDaddy also dominated the trending topics on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.

Even though Namecheap’s campaign kicked into life from a sensitive issue, you have to hand it to the registrar for acting so quickly to capitalise on the outrage whilst giving back to a charity that protect the animals killed in the video.