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.