Online Microbusinesses Lower Local Unemployment, Says GoDaddy and UCLA Research

Originally published on GoDaddy Newsroom

TEMPE, Ariz., April 4, 2024 /3BL/ -- Entrepreneurship is booming, and online microbusinesses – those with 10 or fewer employees, a domain and an active website – create jobs and lower unemployment rates across the U.S., according to new research from GoDaddy and UCLA Anderson Forecast.

This means:

• At the county level, every microbusiness entrepreneur is correlated with seven additional jobs by hiring directly, indirectly or creating more demand and spending more in their communities. 
   
• Adding 1,000 new microbusiness entrepreneurs in a county is associated with a drop of 0.11 percentage points in the unemployment rate. This means that studying Miami-Dade County in Florida, with almost 430,000 microbusinesses and 2.1 million people over the age of 18, adding just 1,000 entrepreneurs would reduce the region's unemployment rate by almost 7% (from 1.6% to 1.49%).

"We've learned that online businesses with 10 or fewer employees are creating more jobs than before – up to seven jobs for every one entrepreneur, compared to only two just a few years ago," said Alexandra Rosen, senior director of Venture Forward. "Our findings show how even the smallest of businesses can significantly drive down unemployment rates in communities across the country."

Explore the data in full here and learn more in the blog post here. For more information on the state of microbusinesses across the country, visit www.godaddy.com/ventureforward.

About GoDaddy Venture Forward 
GoDaddy's Venture Forward research initiative analyses more than 20 million online businesses with a digital presence (measured by a unique domain and an active website). Most of these businesses employ fewer than ten people, categorizing each as a microbusiness. While these microbusinesses may be small, their impact on economies is outsized even though they are often too informal or too new to show up in traditional government statistics. To find out more about GoDaddy's Venture Forward research, visit www.godaddy.com/ventureforward

About GoDaddy 
GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) helps millions of entrepreneurs globally start, grow, and scale their businesses. People come to GoDaddy to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers, sell their products and services, and accept payments online and in person. GoDaddy's easy-to-use tools help microbusiness owners manage everything in one place, and its expert guides are available to provide assistance 24/7. To learn more about the company, visit www.GoDaddy.com.

About UCLA Anderson Forecast 
UCLA Anderson Forecast is one of the most widely watched and often-cited economic outlooks for California and the nation and was unique in predicting both the seriousness of the early-1990s downturn in California and the strength of the state's rebound since 1993. The Forecast was credited as the first major U.S. economic forecasting group to call the recession of 2001 and, in March 2020, it was the first to declare that the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had already begun. www.uclaforecast.com

About UCLA Anderson School of Management 
UCLA Anderson School of Management is among the leading business schools in the world, with faculty members globally renowned for their teaching excellence and research in advancing management thinking. Located in Los Angeles, a gateway to the growing economies of Latin America and Asia and a city that personifies innovation in a diverse range of endeavors, UCLA Anderson's MBA, Fully Employed MBA, Executive MBA, UCLA-NUS Executive MBA, Master of Financial Engineering, Master of Science in Business Analytics, doctoral and executive education programs embody the school's Think in the Next ethos. Annually, some 1,800 students are trained to be global leaders seeking the business models and community solutions of tomorrow. www.anderson.ucla.edu

Source: GoDaddy Inc.