Etsy's First Transparency Report Details Its Crafty Ne'erdowells

Etsy has followed the lead of many companies and has published its own transparency report, detailing the different aspects of its behind-the-scenes operations like complaints against accounts and user data requests. Etsy is different from many of the other companies that detail these numbers, though: they tend to be sites full of messages and personal data while Etsy is an e-commerce service. It isn't surprising, then, that a large amount of its numbers focus on complains about intellectual property violations rather than demands for account data.

Says Etsy, last year it responded to 6,997 intellectual property takedown notices that were submitted correctly. Of its responses, it disabled/removed 176,137 listings spanning 42,526 of its sellers. While the number is big, Etsy says this affected a half of a single percent of its total site listings.

The company had to get a little meaner with some of its users, though, and as a result shut down 3,993 shops for repeatedly being found in violation of the company's intellectual property policy. Then there are flags, of which it had 305,762 last year with some being from the community and others from Etsy itself.

It manually reviewed 73-percent of those and left the rest to its software. Non intellectual property violations led to 168,288 accounts being closed. Finally, the company gave up member data in 32 out of 41 instances spanning a total of 43 accounts.

SOURCE: Etsy Blog