According to a report in Variety this morning and shared by some GoDaddy employees on Twitter, GoDaddy will be advertising again in the Super Bowl. I believe the Super Bowl is the most watched television show each year, and last year was the first year GoDaddy didn’t have a Super Bowl commercial since it began advertising during the game in 2005. Apparently, the company will use the commercial to advertise a new product, although no details about that product were shared in the Variety article.

GoDaddy really made a name for itself as a result of its regular advertising presence during the Super Bowl. The company had provocative advertising campaigns prominently featuring attractive women. The advertisements regularly received scrutiny, but they helped to make GoDaddy a well-known brand name. The publicly traded company now has a market cap of nearly $6 billion.

During the past few years, GoDaddy has done quite a bit to clean up its brand image. The company’s advertising focuses more on its product and service offerings, and it uses a different type of humor in its commercials. GoDaddy recently had an advertising campaign during the

I noticed that quite a few domain names transferred to NameFind this morning from a company called Traffic Names, Ltd. The portfolio has many high value domain names, and my guess is that this  was an 8 figure acquisition. Jamie Zoch wrote about the acquisition earlier this morning.

After seeing the domain registrant changes and Jamie’s article, I sent an email to Paul Nicks, Vice President of the Aftermarket at GoDaddy. I asked him for an official comment about the acquisition, and I also asked him if the company acquired the entire portfolio or a portion of it. Here’s the official GoDaddy statement  about the acquisition:

“We can confirm that GoDaddy has acquired another great domain name portfolio. This is a high quality portfolio and will help deliver customers their ideal name. The seller asked we keep their identity private, so we will not be disclosing that information.”

In addition to this statement, Paul also confirmed that GoDaddy acquired the entire portfolio. DomainIQ indicates that this is somewhere in the ballpark of 31,000 domain names. That figure doesn’t include names that could have a different email address associated with them or privately registered domain names.

If you have a look at DotComAgency.com (or the Archive.org version if the website is taken down), you can see quite a few of the domain names that GoDaddy likely acquired in this deal. Using DomainIQ, I found some of the top names in the portfolio: