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.

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.

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.

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.

They say content is king, and having good content written by experts is even better. According to a variety of Twitter posts on Friday, Go Daddy held a “write-a-thon” this week, and the result will benefit customers and others searching for information about domain names, Go Daddy, hosting, and a variety of other topics.

GoDaddy operates its Inside Go Daddy blog, which the company updates regularly. Inside Godaddy is described as the:

“inside source for what’s going on with Go Daddy’s tech experts. You’ll get insight and opinions from Go Daddy’s tech leaders on industry topics, company projects & open source initiatives … the leading edge, unconventional, “behind-the-scenes” information you won’t find anywhere else. It’s not PR, it’s not executive talk, it’s the story straight from Go Daddy’s developers, engineers & IT personnel.”

Some of the expert blog writers include CTO Wayne Thayer, Internal Audit Director Mark Milne, Director of IT Security Operations Scott Gerlach, Chief Scientist David Koopman, Vice President of Product Development Richard Merdinger, and a variety of executives and directors.

Holding a Write-a-thon like this is a great way for the company to expand its search footprint with expert articles. The company seems to be taking advantage of Google’s authorship program (via Google Plus), giving the search results an even larger presence with author photographs right in the results.

Many companies and website owners outsource their content to writing services and ghostwriters, but it looks like Go Daddy is doing things the right way. They are having their own experts provide the content.