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GoDaddy Files For $100 Million IPO

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.

mpicpp (3454017) writes with news that GoDaddy has filed to make an initial public offering "This is the second time GoDaddy has tried to go public. It went this route back in 2006, but then backed out when it didn't get the pricing it wanted." The SEC Filing indicates that they are not in the greatest financial condition. Quoting CNN: "GoDaddy hasn't made a profit since 2009. The company lost $279 million in 2012. It bled another $200 million last year. This year doesn't look much better, with another $51 million lost in the first quarter." Founder Bob Parsons, currently executive chairman, will be stepping down but remaining on the board of directors.

25 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. sounds dire by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    An IPO that, even if successful, would cover only 6 months of their burn rate?

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    1. Re:sounds dire by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 5, Funny

      I went to godaddy.com to see what the heck they do anyway, but I just got a spam page saying godaddy.com was up for sale and did I like to buy it?

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      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    2. Re:sounds dire by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I assure you, it's a real site. You may want to check for malware. Anyways, they're a bad registrar and they supported SOPA.

      https://medium.com/cyber-security/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd

    3. Re:sounds dire by kelarius · · Score: 2, Informative

      I assure you, it's a real site. You may want to check for malware.

      WOOOOOSH

      --
      Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
    4. Re:sounds dire by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      GoDaddy failing would not be evidence of a tech bubble, only a horribly-run company.

      There's plenty of other inexpensive web hosts out there that are doing just fine.

  2. Another bubble by rodrigoandrade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is going to make top Go Daddy execs millionaires, and every other stockholder gets screwed after the execs flip and the stock tumbles down in the months following said IPO.

    Protip: NEVER enter an IPO, no matter how awesome you think the company is. Wait and see how the stock performs over an extended period.

    1. Re:Another bubble by tomhath · · Score: 4, Informative

      I have to agree with you on both points. Although it's more likely the venture capitalists who are trying to get out of the sinking boat at this point.

  3. Not profitable by sjbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The SEC Filing indicates that they are not in the greatest financial condition.

    Shocking. They sell an aggressively priced commodity product and spend a ton on stupid sexist advertising to people who aren't their customers. Their customer service sucks and their website (last I checked) is a hot mess. While I haven't read their prospectus I don't really see them ever being more than modestly profitable at best. They seem to be taking an Amazon business model - growing now and worrying about profits down the road. But unlike Amazon the economic barriers to competition are quite a bit lower.

    1. Re:Not profitable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree except that you left out one minor point. They do not actually offer any product other than serving web pages on an emasculated platform.

      They do have one thing going for them. If they go belly up then the number of "websites" being served by MS server software will plummet precipitously. I suspect some folks in Redmond are looking at this and doing some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how much it is worth in advertising to be able to say they serve more "websites" than apache.

    2. Re:Not profitable by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      It doesn't help that Amazon (while their margins are pitiful) has a pretty good reputation(and, since they sell stuff that everybody and your grandparents buy, rather than semi-specialized tech services, good reputation probably helps every purchase a bit) and an excellent reputation for efficiency.

      It would be interesting to see what happens if they did try to turn the screws a bit and generate some real profit; but it's hard to argue that they are anything but good at what they do. GoDaddy? Cheap; but also pretty shit, and tolerated more or less only because they are cheap.

    3. Re:Not profitable by HangingChad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Their customer service sucks and their website (last I checked) is a hot mess.

      Slashdot moderation needs an Understatement rating. GoDaddy is to domain registrars what Comcast is to the cable industry.

      --
      That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
    4. Re:Not profitable by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And they use it for a few months before realizing it is terrible and dumping it. Been there, done that.

      With GoDaddy, my static content was hosted on the same server as a bunch of @&^#@&$ WordPress and PHPBB instances, and every time somebody searched on those sites, it tied up a slot on the server for an extended period of time. Run enough of them in parallel, and suddenly you have 15+ second latency between when the connection is established and when the server begins serving data.

      I pointed out the problem, providing detailed time stamps for dozens of such insane periods of poor performance over the course of one or two days. They said they couldn't find anything wrong. Then, I asked them to move me to a different server that had mostly static content and no scripts, but they said no, and I said, "Bye."

      Of course, to be brutally honest, I was considering leaving before I even finished pushing the content *to* GoDaddy's servers. That hellish experience was caused entirely by GoDaddy's utterly incompetent system administration practices. Instead of setting up one server for shell access and a separate server to serve the actual content, as far as I can tell, they used a single server for both tasks. To prevent users from abusing CPU resources, they set a time limit on processes. That sort of policy makes sense on a web server, but on a shell server, it makes uploading your web tree almost impossible. I couldn't use rsync because it wouldn't begin sending data before the timeout, and I couldn't use tar because it can't be resumed. I couldn't use scp because there were single files that took longer to upload over my slow DSL connection than the (IIRC 30 second) timeout. I can't remember how I ended up solving the problem, but I think it involved using rsync on a single file at a time. (No, I will not use FTP....)

      But even that wasn't enough hell for GoDaddy. No, they also decided to prevent people from abusing the server by connecting to it too many times in a short period of time, so whenever I uploaded short files, I would exceed that threshold and it would refuse the connection. And as long as I continued to try to connect, it would never succeed. So to get my files uploaded to the server, I had to write an unholy script that alternated between multiple source IP addresses, copying files one at a time using rsync over ssh.

      Unfortunately, this level of incompetence seems to be typical of GoDaddy from all indications. You'd have to be nuts to buy stock in this company. Their entire business model depends on a steady stream of suckers, and there are enough sites out there with similar prices and better ratings, so that stream is drying up. Unless they can hire some competent customer support people and competent IT people, they have nowhere to go from here but down the drain.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  4. How by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How the fuck do you blow $200+ million a year being a registrar? Where does the money go? It can't possibly cost that much unless they are doing something very, very wrong. Where is the cash going?

    SOPA support?

  5. Not their core competency by OzPeter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    GoDaddy should stick to their core competency of strippers, pole dancing and parties(*) rather than this internet thing.

    * Well thats the impression I get from their ads.

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    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    1. Re:Not their core competency by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      I have the hunch that this impression is pretty accurate... I dunno what they're actually doing, but they should dump that internet branch and instead concentrate on what they actually CAN do.

      Whatever that may be.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  6. Suggestion for a profitable GoDaddy by jkrise · · Score: 2

    They should fire all their marketing executives and build a simple website, and try online marketing instead. They can employ tools like, you knoe, Search Engine Optimisation, Website building tools etc. etc.

    Whenever I look at the ugly girls dancing in the GoDaddy ads I can see where they keep losing more and more millions.

    --
    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  7. Not hard to blow a lot of cash by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How the fuck do you blow $200+ million a year being a registrar?

    By buying pointless Super Bowl ads and selling your product for less than it actually costs to provide. It's not hard to lose a lot of money really fast if you sell a commodity product people want for less than it actually costs to provide it. I had a teacher once point out how easy it is to generate sales. Just sell a $2 bill for $1. You'll have all the revenue you can handle but you'll be out of business faster than you can say "Chapter 7 bankruptcy".

    Where does the money go?

    Go dig up the prospectus and it will tell you. I can't be bothered but my guess would be some combination of advertising, infrastructure and management compensation. Possibly debt service too if they went that route.

  8. Go-Daddy Bottom Feeder by upuv · · Score: 2

    This company has been a lowbrow bottom feeder since the beginning.

    At first glance the pricing looks OK. But soon you realize you are fenced in. You find out your domain is held hostage by lack of features. Features that are ransomed off.

    Buying Go-Daddy is purely a speculative exercise that is not backed by history or sane projections.

  9. Re:The summary really says it all by philip.paradis · · Score: 2

    I think you're probably right, and I'm not going to shed a tear when it happens. I might raise a toast, though.

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  10. Re:like those are hard to see on teh intarwebs by NotDrWho · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Their sleazy advertising is what caused me to actually stop recommending them to clients. I used to recommend them to clients for cheap hosting. But after they started to run ads that looked more like Hooters commercials (or ads for a strip club) than ads for a reputable hosting company, I dropped them faster than a hot potato. I'm not sure what kind of dumbass CEO thought he would attract more businesses and charities looking to set up websites by running Superbowl ads featuring half-naked women boozing it up at frat parties, but he definitely misjudged his audience.

    Even their homepage ended up being a fucking embarrassment. I've seen porn sites that were more modest.

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    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  11. Oh no! by Arancaytar · · Score: 2

    Surely once they are publicly traded, their days of being ethical and not evil will be at an end.

  12. Since 2009? You don't say! by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gee, I wonder what could have effected their profitablity since that year.....

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

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    Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  13. Re:hosting is a rough business... by philip.paradis · · Score: 2

    Whoa there cowboy, maybe you'll be less testy if you hoover another rail of that Colombian mood enhancer off your desk. Gotta keep your blood levels even, you know.

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    Write failed: Broken pipe
  14. Amazon's P/E ratio by sjbe · · Score: 2

    Although Amazon has a ridiculous P/E of 513 [google.com] at least they make some money and are not bleeding red ink line Go Daddy.

    Amazon's P/E doesn't mean much because they are heavily reinvesting in the company with stuff like Kindle etc. They could be highly profitable tomorrow if they wanted but they appear to be thinking long term. If you want a better idea of the value of Amazon's stock look at their Revenue vs Market Cap multiple which is approximately 2X. Most fairly valued companies have a revenue multiple between 1X and 2X so Amazon is not really outrageously priced most likely. I doubt GoDaddy could flip a switch and be profitable tomorrow.

  15. Re:like those are hard to see on teh intarwebs by kurkosdr · · Score: 4, Informative

    GoDaddy: A cybersquatter masquerading as a registrar. If you forgot to pay the bill, they 'll take down your site and will fill up your domain with ads. And god forbid you actually break their TOS. They 'll take your domain and put ads, you won't be able to take it back, and they wom't even tell you which parts of the TOS you supposedly broke. There was a site "nodaddy" detailing those things.