Christine Jones, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary for Go Daddy, will leave the company Friday after 10 years.
Jones managed all legal affairs for the company and frequently represented the company as a witness at congressional hearings. She was a key player at the company and the industry given her role in lobbying in Washington. She even had a cameo in GoDaddy’s 2009 “enhancement” Super Bowl commercial.
During her ten years at the company she watched it grow from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company, including taking on an investment from PE firms last year.
But her tenure wasn’t always smooth sailing. Most recently, Jones got caught up in SOPA as she originally testified to congress in favor of the bill. GoDaddy later relented and changed its stance on the bill, but its position resulted in a good number of customers transferring their domains to competitors.
Warren Adelman discloses new TLD applications and discusses the challenges of offering more domain choices to customers.
Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, has applied for three top level domains, CEO Warren Adelman told Domain Name Wire today. (News of the applications was first reported by Paul Sloan at CNET).
The company has applied for its own .brand domain .godaddy, as well as two additional top level domains (TLD). That’s a lot less than you can expect from at least one competitor.
“As the world’s largest domain name registrar, we wanted to have our own TLD,” said Adelman.
He thinks the company’s plans for the additional two TLDs will be more interesting. But he is mum on what those TLDs will be since the application process is still open.
Even bigger on the company’s radar for the next couple years is how it will offer hundreds of new TLDs to its customer base.
“No one can sell 2,000 TLDs,” he said.
Go Daddy already uses algorithms to determine which TLDs to show in domain search results. The company received a patent on its ranking system last year. Think of it like Google Adwords; registries “bid” for placement on GoDaddy.com and then are ranked based on a number of algorithms.
“We’ve done some work with it [the algorithm] and you may see it become more important in 2013 as a way for us to actually handle a fairly large number of new TLDs,” said Adelman. “All registrars will have to make decisions about how to best present TLDs to customers.”
With registry-registrar integration, Go Daddy will be able to offer its own TLDs to its customers. Although that may create a conflict, Adelman points to the company’s handling of .me as proof that it can be managed. The company helped commercialize .me, the country code for Montenegro.
“.Me started with an email I sent to the Minister of Communications in Montenegro,” Adelman said. Go Daddy has certainly promoted .me on its site, but it’s not the number one search result.
As for the company’s position on new TLDs in general, Adelman says it has always been cautious.
“We always voiced caution in the size of the rollout,” he said. “We said ‘Listen, there’s a lot of things happening simultaneously — new TLDs, IPV6, IDNs, DNNSEC. Perhaps there should be a more cautious approach.’”
Problems with ICANN’s new TLD application system are one example of unexpected challenges that can come up — and that’s just with applying. Adelman says ICANN will certainly have to explain the problems to the community at its next meeting in Prague. But he puts it in perspective.
“Every day I wake up and, generally speaking, the internet works. People kind of trivialize that accomplishment, but for the most part they’ve made sure the infrastructure is up and working and we can access IP addresses as part of the domain name system. They’ve done this in a complicated environment of various internet users.”
GoDaddy party transforms Chase Field into amusement park.
Every year Go Daddy spends millions of dollars on a holiday party for its employees at Chase Field in Phoenix.
This year it expanded with a road show in Iowa and Colorado, but the big show in the desert was as big as ever. The company gave over $1 million in cash prizes to its employees and entertained them with performances by Kid Rock, Dierks Bentley and Trace Adkins.
The pictures and video of the event are pretty phenomenal, including a huge “Mount Rushmore” statue of the GoDaddy Girls.
Here are some pictures from the event as well as video featuring Bob Parsons, Kid Rock, and more.
.Co to be featured in GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial.
The .co top level domain name will get heavy exposure at the Super Bowl for a second year in a row.
Today domain name registrar GoDaddy announced that one of its two commercials in next year’s Super Bowl will feature .co.
Last year’s .co/GoDaddy commercial tempted viewers to visit GoDaddy.com to find out who the new .co girl was. Despite the young Tabitha Taylor’s body in the commercial, the .co girl turned out to be Joan Rivers.
The domain registrar said last year’s .co commercial sparked a record jump in domain registrations for the company — 466% within 15 minutes.
Go Daddy Girls Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels will return for this year’s commercials, which Go Daddy says have already been approved by NBC’s “Standards and Practices” division.
The 50 million domains number represents the total number registered at a point in time. If you add up all the domains registered over time the number would be much higher.
As of the end of May GoDaddy.com had nearly 30 million .com domain names registered. (May is the latest month with actual data filed with ICANN.) That represents nearly a third of the .com base and more than three times as many as the nearest competitor, eNom.
Its share of newer top level domain names is even higher. In the same month GoDaddy.com had over 4 million .info domains registered out of a total of 7.4 million registered everywhere.
You can expect this number to jump when new top level domains are launched in a couple years.
GoDaddy.com now owns NoDaddy.com, Kevin Murphy reports for The Register.
NoDaddy.com was set up as a gripe site after the domain registrar suspended the registration of security mailing list SecLists.org.
Since then it has been a gathering place for customers and ex-employees of the world’s largest domain name registrar. They aired their grievances there, often times sending traffic to Domain Name Wire articles about various Go Daddy-related issues.
There have certainly been some legitimate complaints about Go Daddy over the years, and I haven’t been afraid to point out some of the company’s missteps.
But it also attracted some disgruntled ex-employees, including Toby Harris, who sued the company for wage theft. Harris claimed he lost over $1,300 in commissions as a call center rep because his manager claimed his call quality was low. (Many call centers have such rules — it’s easy to earn commissions if you neglect other parts of a customer contact.) Harris even sent out a press release about his initial lawsuit, claiming “Godaddy.com executives deny any wrongdoing.” Except that Go Daddy hadn’t actually commented on the lawsuit.
According to Murphy, Harris had become the top contributor on the site.
Investment makes 36 millionaires, will help company expand overseas and acquire complementary businesses.
I just got off the phone with GoDaddy.com founder Bob Parsons, who explained the deal his company just struck with KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
Contrary to reports in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, this was not an outright acquisition. Parsons remains the single largest shareholder in the company in what he terms a “partnership”.
Before the deal Parsons owned 78% of the company and employees owned 22% through stock options.
Both Parsons and the employees benefited from the investment, with 36 employees getting $1 million plus checks.
All of the senior management invested in the deal and a number of people with options rolled some of it into stock in the company.
Why not just sell the company?
“I’m not dead yet, Andrew,” Parsons told me. “The reason I’m the single largest investor is because this is what I eat, sleep, and breathe.”
Parsons will remain with the company as Executive Chairman of the Board and company president Warren Adelman has been promoted to CEO.
“We cut a smokin’ deal with KKR, Silver Lake Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures,” said Parsons. But it isn’t just about the money, he said. “What excites me is what they bring to us as a competitor.”
He explained that the investors’ experience in overseas markets and technology will help the company grow. The company may also make acquisitions, such as to help the company offer a greater range of cloud based services.
“If I could pick three companies out of the blue [to partner with], these are the guys I’d pick,” he said.
Parsons would not disclose the amount of investment, but when I asked him about reports of $2.25 billion he said “it might be close”.
[Updated story to reflect timeline as last night, not this morning. Note that if you still can't reach GoDaddy.com it's probably your ISP's cache. You can test any site here to see if it's just you. Also, if for some reason your Go Daddy hosting isn't working, this is unrelated. You should call Go Daddy support.]
Customers trying to register new domain names or manage their accounts at GoDaddy.com last night hit a snag: the home page wasn’t working.
Everything is back to normal now after an outage lasting “several hours”.
Go Daddy CIO Neil Warner says the outage was not the result of any sort of attack and was the company’s own fault. It made some changes to the site this morning and this caused the home page to stop working. While it worked to resolve the problem the company forwarded GoDaddy.com to the company’s mobile site. The mobile site was operational and allows users to do many of the things they do at GoDaddy.com.
Warner said the outage clearly shouldn’t have lasted this long and he is investigating how it happened and how to avoid it in the future.
The auction price increase makes sense given that auction listings now show up in the registration path when someone searches for the exact domain name on Go Daddy.
A Premium Listing carries a 30% commission while the typical auction listing only cost 5% until now. This is steep difference based on a few small differences in convenience:
1. Premium Listing domains can be purchased by a customer immediately through their shopping cart.
2. Premium Listing domains have instant transfer so there are no transfer headaches.
3. Auction purchases require the customer to buy a $4.95 auction membership.
I suspect these differences account for significant sales velocity, but a 25% additional commission is very high.
While 15% is three times the old 5% commission, it’s still in line with industry standards especially given the added registrar exposure.
Registrar files two applications for ideas related to helping people find book web sites.
Go Daddy has filed two patent applications related to helping web users connect to book web sites.
U.S. applications 12/625892 and 12/625919 (pdf) provide for “redirecting a user to a book’s website after submitting a request for information about the book. The book’s website or a link to the website may be displayed to the user on a client browser.”
For example, a user could type an ISBN number into an interface and be redirected to the book’s web site.
So what does this have to do with domain names? It’s a way to encourage authors and publishers to register more domain names.
An author might be notified of multiple domain names to register, including the book’s ISBN, the book name with alternate top level domain names, and perhaps his own name in .me to create a biography web site.
Upon registering the domains, the author or publisher may be notified that it appears these domain names are related to a book, and offering to forward the domain names to the make book web site.
The applications were filed in 2009 and just published today.
The .co top level domain name will get heavy exposure at the Super Bowl for a second year in a row.