GoDaddy Elephant Killing Leads to Competitor Raising $20K to Save Elephants

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons recently took a vacation in Africa, where he hunted an elephant, posted video of the killing and slaughter of the elephant, and and tweeted it out to the world.

You’ve probably heard the story by now. Since then, there has been a massive backlash against GoDaddy, a public war of words with PETA, and numerous people pulling their sites from GoDaddy’s services.

NameCheap, another Domain regsitrar and competitor of GoDaddy saw this as an opportunity to get a lot of new business, and try to save some elephants at the same time. The company offered a domain transfer special offering discounts to those switching their domains from GoDaddy, and donating 25% of the revenue for each domain transfer to the Save the Elephants charity.

“We’ve decided to throw our support behind our Elephant friends by offering domain transfers at a price where we actually lose money,” the company said.

Today, NameCheap said in a tweet that it has raised over $20,000.

@Namecheap
Namecheap.comThank you Namecheap customers, new and old! We have raised $20,433 to savetheelephants.org. We appreciate your support! 2 hours ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto

The whole ordeal is likely to leave a big stain on GoDaddy’s reputation from here on out. Even once the initial discussion dies down, this thing has received tons of press coverage (mostly unfavorable for GoDaddy), and it will be out there all over the web, and in search results forever.

Of course Parsons isn’t ashamed of it. He did post the video, tweet it, and has been on the defensive about it.

Meanwhile, NameCheap has taken the bad PR GoDaddy has received and turned it into great PR for itself. So while they may get an initial flood of new business, they’re reputation should last a while too, barring any unforeseen incidents.

There are 7 Comments. Add Yours.

Gibrana
April 5, 2011 at 3:13 pm

If you have any domains registered with GoDaddy, please consider changing your registrar. Don’t support people like Bob Parsons. This isn’t his first offense either. Here are easy, step-by-step instructions: http://goo.gl/0zpDy.
MrAndrewJ
April 5, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Awesome!

These guys put a constructive, positive angle on the matter. It will hopefully even benefit their company, their new clients and the elephants. This should be held up as a shining example of how to deal with a undesirable situation.
Don
April 6, 2011 at 12:17 am

No the took advantage of a situation. damn zombies
Jesse
April 6, 2011 at 3:35 am

Ha. You people think pulling your sites from GoDaddy is going to hurt them? Bob made 94 million dollars in the month of January ALONE.

I really doubt the crappier competitor raising 20k and gaining some of his cheap assed customers are really putting a dent in his wallet.
Amberen
April 6, 2011 at 11:20 am

Yeah…I pretty much left GoDaddy a while ago. I just don’t like some of their business practices, and I’ve been with NameCheap for a while now, and like them a lot.

As a side note, did you know that, with NameCheap, if you register a new domain and, within (I think) 72 hours you change your mind about it, you can essentially get a refund, minus 99 cents? I don’t know if there are other registrars that do that, but it’s neat that NameCheap does.

Also, NameCheap has free privacy, whereas last time I checked, GoDaddy was charging for it (and, it seemed that they were forcing you to get it). I remember not being able to easily disable the privacy option.

I unfortunately still have some domains registered with GoDaddy. I tried to switch once, but they make it so hard to do so.

This thing that Parsons did in Africa is sure controversial, but switch to NameCheap because it is, in my opinion, a better service.

And, kudos to NameCheap for jumping on this. That’s a good example of great marketing.
Michael Cheek
April 7, 2011 at 4:42 pm

The loss of a few thousand customers is not a big deal to GoDaddy. The goal and strategy for this wasn’t to get more hosting customers. It was to highlight Video.me, GoDaddy’s competing version of YouTube. So far, the whole thing has been a resounding success! Check out the evidence: http://wp.me/p1hiro-jn.
Jess
April 13, 2011 at 10:32 am

Other hosting companies are offering a similar deal in light of the elephant situation. HostPapa is donating $5 for every customer that switches over from GoDaddy,and new customers can use the coupon code: “elephant”.