1.5 Million Stop PIPA Bars Served

Ten days ago, we joined the rest of the online community to voice our opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), both of which threatened free speech online and the very foundation of the Web. Sites like Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing went dark on January 18th in protest, and seven million Americans signed a petition to have the bills killed.

Our small contribution was the Stop PIPA Hello Bar, a free version of our notification bar that websites could add to the top of their site to voice their opposition to the bills and educate their visitors about the damage this legislation could cause to the Web. More than 1,000 sites added the Stop PIPA Hello Bar, and more than one million visitors saw the bar that week. Shortly after January 18th both pieces of legislation were pulled from consideration. We all cheered as someone Tweeted “Internet 1, Congress 0.”

To date, the Stop PIPA Hello Bar has been viewed more than 1.5 million times across the Web. What started as a modest attempt to pitch in and do our part took off. It hit the top of Hacker News within an hour of us sharing it, was featured on Boing Boing, Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit and Hipmunk) added the bar to his site and Bread Pig, and to top it off, Radiohead used it to show their opposition to the bill on their site. We were flattered and humbled.

So thank you Internet. Thank you for embracing our contribution and for rallying to stop these bad pieces of legislation. It was quite a thrill and an honor to play a small part in winning the day. Unfortunately, the fight is not over, as other legislation threatens the Web. We must stay vigilant and ensure that we protect the Internet and everything it does for us individually and as a global community. We’ll be here ready to contribute where we can, and we’re hard at work figuring out how to make Hello Bar a tool that causes can deploy whenever they have a need, to reach and activate people who have a passion for the causes that matter to them most.