Polldaddy was founded in 2006 by David Lenehan in Sligo, Ireland and was acquired by Automattic in 2008. Polldaddy is a platform agnostic service providing users with the ability to create polls and surveys.
Today, 12 years later, Automattic is retiring the Polldaddy name and replacing it with Crowdsignal. Outside of some minor color changes, and updated graphics, the service will largely remain the same.
Redirects are in place so that bookmarked links to edit surveys, polls, and quizzes will continue to work. Beginning October 24th, visitors to Polldaddy.com will be redirected to Crowdsignal.com.
There are a few notable changes to keep in mind regarding the transition. The Polldaddy dashboard will automatically redirect to the Crowdsignal version. Polldaddy’s API will live on https://api.crowdsignal.com/v1/ instead of https://api.polldaddy.com/. Surveys and quizzes will be served from survey.fm and polls will be served from poll.fm.
According to Donncha Ó Caoimh, some networks and hosts may need to whitelist the following domains to prevent interruptions in service. The domains are:
- api.crowdsignal.com
- app.crowdsignal.com
- crowdsignal.com
- survey.fm
- poll.fm
Surveys, quizzes, and polls that are embedded will continue to function normally.
It’s the end of an era for the Polldaddy name but what the announcement doesn’t include is why the rebranding was necessary. Whatever the reasons are for rebranding, Crowdsignal is a more accurate way to describe what the service provides without being tied to a gender.
“I never liked that it was a ____Daddy name. That was derivative of GoDaddy, and also gendered.
‘Poll’ in the name limited what they appear to do to just polls. Polls are a feature that didn’t differentiate them, now they have name w/ benefit: understanding your audience”
Wanting to avoid association with GoDaddy is one thing, but a rebrand because one guy on the staff felt offended is bizarre.
If nothing else is changing, all this does is water-down the clarity of the brand to sound like every other digital-something — when ultimately the primary product will still be “polls”…
E.g. even “Non-Binary Fluid Polls” would still target the niche.