Mozilla’s Anti-SOPA Message Reached 40 Million People

By blacking out the default Firefox start page and using social media, Mozilla reached 40 million people with its anti-SOPA/PIPA message. According to a stats wrap-up just posted to the Mozilla blog, 30 million people in the US saw the start page’s call to action, 1.8 million visited its mozilla.org/SOPA info page, and the effort generated 360,000 emails to Congress.

Additionally, Mozilla sent out messages to 9 million people via Facebook, Twitter, and its Firefox + You newsletter, over 20,000 retweeted or Liked these messages, and Mozilla drove 600,000 visits to the EFF’s Strike Against Censorship Page.

For comparison, here’s how Ars Technica and others tabulated the contributions of some big web properties:

• Wikimedia Foundation – 162 million people reached, 8 million views of its Congress member contact page
• Google – 13 million page views to its anti-SOPA page and 7 million signatures to its petitions.
• Twitter – Rather than blacking out, it helped transmit 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets in 16 hours.
• The White House – Drove 103,785 SOPA and PIPA petition signatures

Mozilla’s action didn’t have the scale of Wikipedia or Google’s effort, but it should still be commended for doing its part. Next week when the Senate votes, we’ll see if yesterday’s web-wide protest made a difference.

For more info on the protests and their impact, check out Espikes09’s stream of online piracy legislation coverage

CRUNCHBASE

• MOZILLA

Company:Mozilla

Website:mozilla.com

Launch Date:January 2, 1998

Funding:$2.3M

Born from Netscape’s 1998 open sourcing of the code base behind its Netscape Communicator internet suite, Mozilla Firefox currently holds approximately 22.48% of the world market for internet browsers as of April 2009. Version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 after a series of name changes, and within a year close to 100 million downloads of the browser technology had occurred. The following two years saw upgrades to version 1.5 in November 2005 and 2.0 in October 2006....