

Godaddy.com up for sale. Could fetch $1 Billion - atentaten
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703597204575484153733196856.html?mod=djemalertNEWS

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rwhitman
Bob Parsons is a crazy/interesting dude thats for sure... The complete polar
opposite of any silicon valley CEO.

I don't get nor agree with most of what he does but I find it fascinating..
Has anyone else seen his blog? The irony is even though his video blog series
- he and a busty blonde giving advice with cartoonish editing usually
featuring motorcycles in some way - looks ridiculous its actually really
smart, useful information

Doesn't surprise me he'd prefer to exit with an auction instead of IPO

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kierank
Godaddy always struck me as the Ryanair of domain names. A company that you
didn't need to love as long as they did what they said on the tin.

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leftnode
They also remind me of Paypal: you can use them fine for years and years, and
then one day they totally fuck you over.

Mind you, I probably have 50+ domains registered with GoDaddy, I've just read
some horror stories too.

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dcurtis
I wonder what is keeping them from doing an IPO. Selling a company as large
and as profitable as GoDaddy at a public auction seems very strange.

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emmett
The high cost of being a public company under our current laws, perhaps.

<http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/7075161?f=search>

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_delirium
The numbers there don't seem nearly high enough to determine a decision like
this. I think it'd take a lot more than an expense equal to 1-2% or so of
revenues to cause someone who was going to IPO to go the other way.

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KrisJordan
Surprising to read between 800-900M 2009 revenue and a price tag of 1B.

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hristov
Well, revenue is not profits. It would be interesting to see what their actual
profits are. For one, they spend a lot of money on advertising.

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qeorge
I would think their profit margins are huge, though you're right, they do
spend a ton of money on ads.

IIRC, registrars pay on the order of 25 cents a domain, which they then resell
for $8 or more, and GoDaddy is the registrar for something like 1/4 of all
.coms. Web hosting and email are very high-margin too.

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dugmartin
The registrars pay $7.34 per .com domain to VeriSign. So they are only making
66 cents on that $8 domain. That is why GoDaddy bombards you with add-ons when
you register a domain.

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bond
I'm sure godaddy gets a discount based on volume...

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hellweaver666
As someone that works for a domain registrar, I can tell you this is
definitely true.

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jhghjnmmn
It does strike me as a very low barrier to entry business. Amazon could sell
domains for 1$ more than versign charge them.

Google could bypass verisign completely and launch their own top level domain
with their own root DNS and give away ".go" domains.

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sandeepshetty
That could be likely with the introduction of the New Top-Level Domains:
<http://www.newtlds.tv/newtlds/> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTLD#New_top-
level_domains>

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jhghjnmmn
The point of the internet is that somebody with enough servers and their own
browser could easily introduce their own TLDs.

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sandeepshetty
I understand what you mean technically, but I don't think the point of the
internet is to let only companies like Google introduce TLDs.

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bl4k
Here is a company, that since its inception, has done the exact opposite of
what is published in business and entrepreneurship papers and has succeeded to
great effect.

Explain that.

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dabent
I'm not sure what you mean by doing the exact opposite. The founder, Bob
Parsons, built something people wanted - a cheaper way to get domain names.
His marketing tactics are, um, a bit different from most online/tech
companies, but he's built two successful companies from the ground up using
tactics from direct marketing.

This time, Parsons acted as his own angel investor burning through millions
from his first company, but seems to have acted rather frugally while building
his business. His first was bootstrapped from home while he worked a day job.
His persistence and determination are remarkable.

Parsons is an outlier because he's built both companies outside of Silicon
Valley with no funding but his own, no degree from a big-name school, but just
drive and guts. I think that's why his businesses look different that what we
normally see. They grew in a different ecosystem and seem like an alternate
species on the outside, but inside they still operate much like other
companies.

If you want to know more details about how he did it, read his blog or listen
to his older podcasts (if you can find them). He's a shameless self-promoter
who doesn't mind telling his story.

But do know that his recent video podcasts are just garbage. After the Super
Bowl commercial that put GoDaddy on the map, he's apparently decided that
buxom females are the only thing that matters and has gone all the way with
it. His earlier audio podcasts were actually more like Mixergy, where he'd
talk to young entrepreneurs about how they did it and share his own stories.
His story helped inspire me to work on my first startup.

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jonursenbach
Here's to hoping that the future owners drop those ridiculous TV ads.

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hagy
I thought about this a while a back, and as ridiculous as their TV ads are, I
do believe they serve a purpose: getting members of the general public to
start with go daddy when they want to create a website. I’d wager a
significant portion of their revenue isn’t from domain registration, and
instead from all the extra services they offer, and first-timers are likely
the main customers of these services. As ridiculous as the commercials are,
they do get the general public's attention and drive first-timers to go
daddy’s services.

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pontifier
I used to have over a hundred domains with them, but they canceled one of my
favorite domains because THEY didn't charge my debit card. The domain was set
to auto-renew, and there was money in the account... They lost me for good.

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hysterix
If godaddy can fetch that much, I would sell it as well; I say bravo to that
man.

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trevorcreech
Wait, is the whole company for sale, or just the domain name?

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duck
The company - _hired to shop the Go Daddy Group Inc_

On a completely different note, just noticed that WSJ injects a link when you
do a copy/paste from their site:

 _Read
more:[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870359720457548...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703597204575484153733196856.html?mod=djemalertNEWS#ixzz0zBM3pPDf*)

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jplewicke
Probably using Tynt - <http://www.tynt.com/> .

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luffy
Leveraged Buyout (LBO) city, baby!

Prediction: a firm like KKR or Carlyle buys GoDaddy and borrows a bunch of
money (> $10B ?) on the cheap, and then uses GoDaddy's revenue to service the
debt.

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loganfrederick
Why would KKR need to borrow $10B? They could get away with $1B, and probably
less than that if they use some cash.

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brc
That's easy to answer : they don't like using their own cash.

The returns are infinite if you don't use any of your own money.

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zackattack
I have all my domains registered with them. Despite the fact that I'm
registering a few domains a month and they obnoxiously upsell me every time,
I've gotten used to them _and_ they have decent customer support that's always
been available for me, as well as rad coupons ($7.49+fee domains). I hope the
sale doesn't change things up too much. When my previous web host,
aSmallOrange got bought, their service became inconsistent, frustrating and
all-in-all _horrible_ so I switched to HostGator and have been thrilled ever
since (24/7 live chat is great!).

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jacoblyles
Don't forget that they park spam pages at your domains if you haven't set the
DNS yet. So make sure you redirect your arbitrary sub-domains.

I hate GoDaddy and all that they stand for. I'll never do business again with
such a spammy company, even if it means paying $2 more a year with someone
else.

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mkramlich
I'd offer $9 for just the domain name.

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mkramlich
humor folks. and on-topic. lighten up!

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mkramlich
that's sad. the voting system is broken. i recommend only allowing admins to
bring any comment below 1 point.

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adammichaelc
I think the voting system is working as intended. One thing that's lame about
Reddit is that the first few comments from a story are jokes and one-liners;
jokes written in forums are rarely funny, and they typically don't add
anything insightful. So I think it's great that jokes are typically downvoted
here.

