By all accounts, yesterday was a big and important day for the tech and online marketing industries. Hundreds of websites protested the SOPA & PIPA bills that are currently moving through the U.S. Congress by either going completely dark for the day or — as we did here on Marketing Land and our sister site, Search Engine Land — blackening a portion of our site and adding anti-SOPA/PIPA messaging to their home pages.
Did it work?
Well, the two bills are not dead, but they’re certainly damaged. By Wednesday night, the Washington Post says that at least four co-sponsors dropped support of PIPA, the Senate version of the bill. The House version, SOPA, also lost prominent support after yesterday’s web protests — protests that extended offline to include hundreds of phone calls to Congress.
How big was yesterday’s anti-SOPA/PIPA movement online? Here are the numbers.
Wikipedia
sopa-wikipedia
Wikipedia was the most prominent website to go completely black yesterday. Their recap of what happened is as follows:
More than 162 million users saw Wikipedia’s blackout page.
More than eight million used the page to look up their representatives’ contact information.
More than 12,000 people commented on the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog post about the blackout.