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GoDaddy

GoDaddy is a privately owned, Internet-based company that provides a variety of services including domain name registration, web hosting and e-business software sales. The company, which is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, was founded by Bob Parsons. Parsons previously owned a financial services software company, which he sold in the mid-1990s upon retirement. He came out of retirement in 1997 to form Jomax Technologies, the predecessor to GoDaddy.

Since it’s inception, GoDaddy has risen to become the largest domain registrar in the world, with tens of million of domains registered to its clients. The company ranks as the world’s largest ICANN-accredited registrar; it’s approximately four times larger than its nearest competition. Recent corporate acquisitions include Outright, Locu, Afternic, and Media Temple.

GoDaddy has redefined Internet hosting services, and it has been the recipient of numerous industry awards and accolades. Among these awards are the 2001 Arizona BBB award for Business Ethics and the 2011 SC Magazine award for Best Security Team. In 2011, it ranked number four in the Phoenix Business Magazine list of “Best Places to Work in the Valley” and it made the 2012 Forbes list of “Best 100 Companies to Work For.”

Known for its sometimes controversial commercials and interesting spokespersons, GoDaddy also sponsors a number of charitable causes in support of domestic violence and child abuse awareness, and sports events, including NASCAR and the Super Bowl. In 2013, the company shifted its advertising strategy to focus more on small to medium sized business owners (SMB). Reflecting this change, its commercials and advertising materials shifted from “sexy” to smart.

Go Daddy Offering Ten $10,000 College Scholarships

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Go Daddy is offering ten college scholarships valued at $10,000 each as part of its Go Daddy .ME Scholarship program. I am not sure if the Dot ME Registry is participating this year, but it would seem so based on the name.

Here’s how eligible people may apply:

Applicants submit a 500-word essay describing how the Internet or technology has helped them and how they envision benefiting from it in the future. Essays are judged on quality, creativity and originality.

The application process began today, and applications will be accepted until  March 30, 2013 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). The ten winners will be announced on April 25, 2013 (or around then). You can look on the website for full details about the scholarship and application process, as there are some eligibility requirements.

Domain investor Brian Diener won a scholarship a couple of years ago, and he is now attending Emory University in Atlanta.  I am sure there are plenty of domain investors who are attending college or have plans to attend college, and it would be great to see someone in this business win a $10,000 college scholarship from GoDaddy.

Paul Nicks and Rich Merdinger 2013 Predictions

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Paul Nicks is responsible for Product Development as the Aftermarket Director at Go Daddy. Rich Merdinger is the Vice President of Product Development in the Domain channel at Go Daddy. These gentlemen were willing to share their 2013 predictions for the domain business.

You can read other 2013 predictions here and here.

gTLDs:

  • gTLD adoption will move east to west, beginning with IDNs and GEOs; US buyers will be slow to invest, as generic English TLDs are not available until later in the roll-out process
  • IDN.IDN domains see strong adoption
  • Contention auctions captivate national media attention leading to broader understanding of gTLDs by the general public
  • Initial confusion by the general public will dissipate quickly as people become accustomed to identifying web addresses by string[dot]string as opposed to the common string[dot]com
  • Business owners will become frustrated with the need to defensively register and trademark-monitor new extensions as they slowly roll-out
  • .NINJA sneaks up on everyone

Aftermarket:

  • .COM, .NET, .ORG and .INFO see a bump in aftermarket pricing as the original gTLDs are seen as a safe harbor in the impending sea of new gTLD confusion
  • PPC makes a comeback, with earnings rising for the first time in years
  • Sunrise/Landrush auctions dominate the second half of the year leading to auction overload for TM holders and investors
  • Domain conferences set attendance records as traditional investors take notice of the domain space

Go Daddy retains its position as market leader through innovations in domain name presentation systems, providing consumers with the means to find the right online identity amongst the sea of new alternatives in one fell swoop.

Update on Little Frank’s Pizza

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I wanted to provide an update to an article I wrote yesterday about Go Daddy’s Website Builder sample website for the fictitious business,  Little Frank’s Pizza.

A reader emailed me at 4:30am to let me know Go Daddy was advertising its Website Builder program on its home page and showed a graphic that included a domain name. When the reader visited that domain name (LittleFranksPizza.com), instead of a seeing a slick website, there was a standard GoDaddy ppc landing page. When I visited that url several hours later, I saw the same thing and wrote an article about it.

Later on in the day, LittleFranksPizza.com was resolving to a fun website instead of the standard Go Daddy landing page. Not only is it a nice looking website, it also contained good information about how the Website Builder program could be used by a SMB to build a functional website.

Nobody asked me to follow up with this article, but I gave them a little bit of a ribbing because the domain name wasn’t operational, and I wanted to follow up on it. Perhaps my article made them realize the site wasn’t working, or perhaps it was a brief glitch that caused the website to not appear. Whatever the case is, put simply, the website was created by Go Daddy exactly how it should have been developed to help promote its Website Builder program.

[Updated] Go Daddy Website Builder Marketing: Smart Strategy, Poor Execution

Go Daddy wisely promotes its Website Builder product to small businesses. In fact, as you can see above, the company is currently giving its most valuable home page real estate to this product, with a large graphic and accompanying video showing “Little Frank’s Secret Ingredient for Success – Website Builder.”

The graphic shows a pizza box with the url LittleFranksPizza.com. As you might have expected, Go Daddy is the registrant of that domain name, so it’s unclear whether Little Frank’s Pizza is actually a customer or used to be illustrative of what customers can do with the Website Builder product.

There is one major problem though. When you visit LittleFranksPizza.com, which some people might do to see what a Website Builder website looks like, there is a standard Go Daddy landing page. People unfamiliar with these landers might assume that this page is what a Website Builder website looks like, and that would be bad for the company, especially since the PPC links advertise other businesses.

Go Daddy should take a cue from How I Met Your Mother’s Bro Bibs website and set up a real website using the Website Builder tools. Obviously they can’t make a real pizza website, but at least they can have some fun with the company’s product and show customers what a website can look like after using its Website Builder product.

This is a good lesson for any company using a fake url in a commercial or other visible spot. Make sure you develop it or at least redirect it!

H/t to Bram for sending this.

**UPDATE*** It looks like there is now a website operating on the domain name.  

Inc. Magazine: Go Daddy Hired Over 1,400 People in Last 3 Years

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There’s an interesting article and interview posted on the Inc. Magazine website focusing on Go Daddy and the company’s growth. The article features an interview with Lane Jarvis, the company’s Chief Human Resources Officer.

According to the article, Go Daddy has become “one of the nation’s top job creators” after hiring over 1,400 employees during the last three years. As many people have experienced, Go Daddy is known for its exceptional customer service. Whether I call into the regular call center or business call center, it seems that I am assisted within a very short period of time, and that is likely due to the quality of employees the company hires as well as its training program.

If you want to read a bit more about Go Daddy’s hiring practices and how the company trains its new hires, I recommend checking out the Inc. article. The focus is primarily on the hiring side of the business, but it gives you an idea about how the company operates.

One thing I’d be interested in knowing that wasn’t discussed was how many of the 1,400 new hires were call center positions, and of those, how many were new positions. Call centers tend to have high attrition rates, so it would be neat to know how much job creation is happening at Godaddy vs. filling vacant positions created by employees that have left the company.

Whatever the case, it’s good to see this type of publicity for a domain industry company.

 

Get Paid Faster With Go Daddy Premium Domain Listing Sales

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If you sell domain names via Go Daddy’s Premium Domain Listings channel, a recent change will almost certainly be of interest to you.

Previously, if you sold a domain name via Go Daddy, you had to wait up to 45 days to receive payment, which came by check in the mail. I am use to receiving payment within less than a week when I sell domain names elsewhere, and 45 days seems pretty excessive to me.

According to an email from my Account Executive, there are now other payment options, which will help get sellers paid more quickly. In the email from Brad Larson, “we have sped up the payment process for the Premium Domain Listings sold on GoDaddy.com. It’s ok to stop and smile. Instead of waiting to receive a check, you can now select a different payment method in the Domain Manager and get paid much sooner.

You can learn more about how to set this up on GoDaddy’s website. One interesting thing to note is that if you do not have a payee account created, Go Daddy will apparently start charging a $25 fee post-sale: “NOTE: If you sell Premium Listings that do not have payee accounts, we send you check payments by default. Starting Jan. 1, 2013, we will deduct a $25 processing fee from check payments.”

Good to see that sellers can now get paid more quickly, although it seems strange that the company is going to penalize people who don’t set this up with an added fee.

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