Last month, Go Daddy released Venture Forward, a report on the impact of local ventures on a community and impact of community on local ventures. It looks at how different socioeconomic factors affect venture growth and compare city rankings across our database of 900+ U.S. city regions. Here’s a description of the report from Daily Yonder…

A new dataset from GoDaddy (a large retailer of website domain names and hosting services) provides some new insight into this topic.  The data focuses on “ventures” which are defined as individual domain names with an active website.  Using data from over 20 million websites, GoDaddy has developed an intriguing measure of broadband use by assessing how many ventures exist per 100 people.  GoDaddy estimates that about 75% of the active websites are business-oriented (as opposed to nonprofit or personal sites).

Here is the map from the Daily Yonder site that caught my attention – it highlights venture density in non-metrocounties – the darker the color, the greater the venture density…

You can see the diversity in venture density with a nod to cook for higher percentage! (For something really good you can check out the growth of ventures in an intereactive map on Go Daddy, track May 2018 to Dec 2019. Check out your county especially if you know there’s been a change in broadband access or other factors in your area!)

So what does is mean for a community to have a greater density or more active ventures?

• Each new venture per 100 people increases the predicted prosperity of a county by an average of 0.4 pts; or 1.4 pts if the venture is highly-active
• On average, counties with 2.5 or more ventures per 100 people saw a net gain in economic prosperity since the Great Recession of 2008.
• Adding one highly active venture per 100 people in a county increases median income by $331 on average or over 19%

Go Daddy makes this info available at the county-level. I have also looked at Minnesota counties and the report – for another post.

Get a nice high level look on why this is valuable:

(In the spirit of full disclosure I host a few dozens websites with GO Daddy and have for 20 years.)