I shared the story about how GoDaddy invited me to be their guest at a NASCAR race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway back in September. I also shared the fun story about how my picture was used on the back of Danica Patrick’s race car in her last race in the GoDaddy #10 car. I want to share another brief story illustrating GoDaddy “going the distance” for me.

Shortly after seeing the race car with my photo on the back, I reached out to my contacts at GoDaddy to ask if I could buy the back panel of the car to display in my office. I figured it would be a long shot, but there would be no harm in asking. I reached out to Paul Nicks and Nick Fuller, and they both told me to connect with Paula Hozza, Director of Corporate Sponsorships at GoDaddy.

I got in touch with Paula, and she let me know that

GoDaddy will be hosting a meetup in its Tempe, Arizona headquarters on February 18 from 6pm-9pm. The free meetup is open to domain investors and others who are interested in talking about domain names with GoDaddy employees and others who are involved in the domain investment space.

Joe Styler shared a link to the Meetup.com page with information about the event:

GoDaddy has become known for their annual Super Bowl commercial. Some years, the company has aired two commercials, and other years, the company stuck to one commercial during the Super Bowl. I would attribute much of GoDaddy’s name recognition, especially in the company’s earlier years, to its Super Bowl advertisements.

According to an article in AdWeek, GoDaddy will not be running a Super Bowl commercial this year. In fact, this year will be the first time in 12 years that GoDaddy is not running a Super Bowl commercial. Adweek quotes a GoDaddy representative who said, “It’s done its job to get our name out there. Now, we can move beyond the generic megaphone of a Super Bowl campaign to a more targeted brand of marketing.”

In my opinion, unless a

At the end of November, Danica Patrick drove the #10 GoDaddy race car for the last time during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. For the last race, the background of the GoDaddy race car was adorned with photos of Danica Patrick taken with GoDaddy customers and employees.

I just found out that a photo that was taken during my meet and greet with Danica Patrick was used on the back of the GoDaddy race car! I always wanted to attend a NASCAR race to see what makes them so popular (it was a blast), but I could never imagine that my face would be on the back of a NASCAR race car during a race!

Here is a photo of the back part of the race car along with a close up and one of the original shots (the one they used was taken by their professional race day photographer):

GoDaddy stock closed up just under 4% today, a nice jump considering the Dow was down over 100 points at the close of business. A publication called Bidness Etc. said GoDaddy “stock surged after the company announced acquisition of almost 70,000 domain names to its Worldwide Media, Inc. domain name portfolio.”

According to Yahoo Finance, GoDaddy’s market capitalization is $5.27 Billion. After the market closed today, GoDaddy stock was trading at $33.94 Up $1.26 on the day and up 3.86%. Considering the market cap, this jump was worth somewhere around $200 million in valuation. Whatever the company paid for Mike Berkens’ portfolio, the market seems to like the news, and I assume the company will do well with the acquisition.

To get perspective from GoDaddy, Phoenix Business Journal