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GoDaddy Up For Auction
An anonymous reader writes "GoDaddy.com, the closely held website that registers Internet domain names, has put itself up for sale in an auction that could fetch more than $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The company, which currently has more than 43 million domains under management, is well known for its edgy advertising, including Super Bowl commercials and ads featuring different 'Go Daddy Girls,' including racing car driver Danica Patrick."
If all their customers renew their domain for just one more year, that's already almost $500,000,000 in revenue right there, just on repeat business, and that's nothing to say about SSL certificates, hosting, or any of their other products. $1,000,000,000 is a pretty good deal for a company that almost certainly makes at least that per year.
the company is 13 years old. this isn't exactly flipping a house after a few months and minor work. Not sure 'pump and dump' is really accurate.
Will bidders for GoDaddy have to use the same sort of hideous web interface that they make their users use? Shame that they will have to forgo that lovely experi- FOR EXTRA $5,000,000 YOU CAN HAVE 50% AOL STOCK IN OUR SuperStock Special Plus++ Plan!!!!! CLICK >HERE!
of GoDaddy's deep dark secrets?
Like the way they (supposedly) steal customer domain ideas after you whois a domain?
Somebody on the inside? How about it?
Also, does anybody have the link for that story from Slashdot a couple years ago, I can't find it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'm sure we could scrape together 1-2 measly billions. Who wants to setup the PayPal account for donations?
Yes, but a reasonable first approximation for the market value of a company is their annual revenue. After that other considerations may increase or reduce that value.
... going... Gone Daddy
No left turn unstoned.
If they do a big rate hike there will be a mass exodus.
It isn't like they have a massive customer goodwill or anything like that.
A rate hike for a product that is not unique? Thats hard. All you can do is keep most of the users happy long term and try and pull more in.
Good to hold long term but no instant bump of growth.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Whoever buys it is able to do a rate hike and truly screw over pre-existing consumers, and that's just if they're feeling generous. There's far worse they could potentially do.
Everything should be owned by the Government! That way no-one would ever be screwed over.
Anyone that uses gross revenue as the sole basis for valuating a company is an idiot. GoDaddy's profit margins on domains are next to insignificant as they are paying Versign $7.34 for every .COM registration. GoDaddy often sells domain registration at a loss to sell their extra services.
also it's privately held so there isn't anything to pump.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Lot of companies offer domain transfer service. You transfer the domain to another registrar, pay for another year of renewal.
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
No, it's more like buying a shiny new house, smashing down walls for 13 years, and trying to foist it off onto a naive buyer.
GoDaddy is infamous. When someone posted MySpace passwords to a mailing list archived by seclists, MySpace complained and GoDaddy immediately shut down seclists.org with less than 1 minute's notice. They weren't even hosting the material, just the DNS record. GoDaddy's counsel said "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous."
As covered on slashdot they also have a habit of coming up with reasons to suspend customers' accounts and not just terminating service but refusing to release the domain to a different registrar unless you pay exorbitant fees.
Also GoDaddy shut down some guy's personal website because they sent him an email to update his invalid email address in the whois information and he didn't reply to it. They didn't just shut down the domain, they sold it.
What kind of joke of a service provider complies with random complaints from non-customers against customers without court order?
godaddy also has probably half of all the spam domains that exist - due to their lovely "auto-register a domain you searched for" shit.
Strictly speaking, you're right -- the "pump" refers to inflating stock values. However metaphorically it could still work with privately held companies. Many startups are built (get their funding) on the basis that they'll make themselves an attractive buy for a larger company. Their goal isn't to prove a business model on their own, but to create a modular subsystem and then parade their tech in large company showrooms. It's kind of like the "Buy Now" button on E-Bay that ends the auction (potential IPO).
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Lots of contractors, realtors, etc. that watch the Superbowl have their own websites. Problem is, very nearly all of them pay someone else to create and/or manage it, which includes selecting the domain register. So I guess I agree with you, although the effects of advertising are never easy to estimate.
I've got about a half dozen domains registered with them. What the hell do I do now?
I dunno. What the hell have you been doing up till now?
What practices? The most telling is the holding of domain names hostage. Any expired domain is held hostage for an amount of time until someone pays the release fee, above and beyond the registration fee. Some business will fall for this tric, but I suspect it is mostly the small user that gets hurt, losing a domain because in the pressures of family and work a domain was not renewed prior to expiration. What same person would work with such a company? Is it any wonder they are selling?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They should have been smart enough to realize that anyone who needs their services already knows who they are.
So, you're saying that pretty much any big brand might as well stop advertising?
Everyone knows Coca Cola by now... They might as well stop advertising, because anyone feels like cola, they just buy Coca Cola!
And most commercials don't work directly: It's just for those moments when the consumer actually wants to buy a domain, the name will ring a bell. At such time, GoDaddy is more likely to be chosen by someone with not enough knowledge of what is important in a webhost; but they'll be remembered by those 'funny' commercials at the Superbowl.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
My father never heard of the place, or thought about anything related to domain names, until he saw commercials for GoDaddy. Now he makes a decent sum of money on the side, simply by registering and selling domain names, speculating.
Their ads are not edgy, they're moronic. Slutty girls have been done before, oh like a trillion quintillion times. GoDaddy is a terrible registrar; their service stinks and they are spammer-friendly. If they are acquired, the purchaser is going to inherit a lot of problems.
I like scantily clad women as much as the next guy, but the Go Daddy commercials are the worst commercials I have ever seen, regardless of how many bimbos they put in them. I was very disappointed in Danica Patrick for selling out to them. She completely lost all respect she had earned as the best or most prominent female Indy/Nascar driver (for the most part, I don't watch Car racing). But more to the point, the commercials are so blatantly, "we must be great, we show bimbos on TV". Hopefully they will go way with new ownership.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I briefly hosted a subdomain on GoDaddy.com. I dumped them because:
If someone had told me how much of a disaster GoDaddy was beforehand, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have thought, "There's no way anybody could be THAT incompetent." Einstein put it best when he said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."
Maybe I should start the bidding at a dollar.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have 20 or so domains registered there.. a lot for my personal biz stuff.. and any time you mess with the technical stack of bb's it makes ya nervous. Yes, their web interface is a gaudy heavy wtf nightmare, yes their hosting is hell in a handbasket, but I have never had a problem with their registrar services and once I set up or change a domain name it propogates usually in less than an hour and never has any problems afterwards and they have always always been one of the least expensive options for registering domains. It makes me terribly nervous to see this go up for sale.
Interesting, so....
Maybe that 5 year deal with Microsoft for parking new websites on Windows IIS servers is ending so they don't know where to make profits this time. I would not leave out the option of Microsoft buying them just to keep Windows IIS marketshare numbers up and to possibly grow them.
If you don't know, Microsoft was paying GoDaddy to place parked web domains on Microsoft IIS based servers so that netcraft and other web server counting systems looked more favorable for Microsoft's web server( IIS ). Prior to that business deal, GoDaddy was parking domains on GNU/Linux apache based servers.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I haven't used GoDaddy in almost 8 years. The stuff being talked about at nodaddy was enough to split my registrar and hosting up (I now use PairNIC, while more expensive has a better policy IMO, for my registrar). My web host is a free host (000webhost.com) so not much to brag on there (aside from a few neat features).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Here are some stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)
Those are just the stories until July of 2008.
It's actually a brilliant ad campaign. An offensive, brilliant campaign.
Domain registrars have the same problem re, advertising that the oil industry has: they're all selling almost the exact same stuff. There's little to distinguish one registrar from another, especially for your average person who doesn't know that much about DNS. There are vast numbers of registrars out there, all of who want you to buy the same thing from them. But if you make a really offensive ad campaign, everyone starts talking about you. All of the sudden, everyone knows *your* name, not anyone else's. Sure, a large chunk of them will be too offended to ever buy from you. But of the rest, those who are only mildly offended may still buy from you, and those who aren't offended or even like it will buy from you as well. You set yourself apart by creating a scandal over something that isn't in the slightest controversial (domain names).
SILENCE BLATHERING TOADIES! We are your new masters.
Bob Parsons sold his previous company, Parsons Technology, purveyors of home accounting, home Bible concordance, home taxes, home legalese software, to Intuit (who sold it to Brøderbund) after Microsoft passed on the deal, so it's not surprising GoDaddy is on the block. He blazed a few new trails through the personal computing woods, I'll give him that, but he was more of a Davey Crockett than a Daniel Boone. Has a penchant for Alamos.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
What a lot of people don't seem to know about GoDaddy is that they don't actually register your domain in your name. They register the domain in their name and then "license" you to use it. At least this is the way they worked several years ago. I discovered this when I was helping a customer set up his web site hosting. He had gone online and registered the domain with GoDaddy - because they advertise a lot - but could not figure anything else out on his own. When I checked into things to help him get the rest set up, I discovered that he wasn't even listed as the owner of the domain. I called GoDaddy's "customer support" only to have them explain that this was for their customer's "protection." They said it was to prevent anyone from stealing someone else's domain but he couldn't explain how it was any different with GoDaddy owning the domain instead of the customer. Over and over again, the "customer service" person tried to hard sell me while ignoring my questions about how I could get my customer's domain actually put in his own name. After intense grilling, the representative admitted that GoDaddy policies do (did) allow for them to assert control of your domains for almost any reason at all, yet he assured me that they would never actually do that. ... Ha!
If they still have the same policy in place (and I will leave it up to others to check on that, as I am certainly not going to try hassling with them ever again) then this could be a disaster for anyone with a valuable domain name that is registered with GoDaddy. This "Sale" could amount to a cashing in on all those domain names they have collected. Domain names that they claim to own while only "licensing" them to the person who registered them. The new owner could easily claim they had bought all those domains and begin auctioning them off to the highest bidder. I'm not saying that they would, but it seems entirely possible and not worth the risk for anyone with a valuable domain name.
Therefore, if anyone has any domain names registered with GoDaddy, then I highly suggest you get them moved to a different registrar ASAP.