I read an article in this morning’s New York Post about a possible “air bridge” between London and New York City. While the air bridge idea wasn’t all that interesting to me right now, it did make me think about AirBridge.com to see how the domain name is being used. What I saw made me chuckle a bit:
What you will notice is a parked page with pay per click links on it. At the top, there is a message about buying the domain name, which links to a page where GoDaddy is selling its Domain Buy Service. The domain name is privately registered and has GoDaddy’s default nameservers (DOMAINCONTROL.com), indicating that the registrant likely has not done anything with the domain name yet.
What made me LOL was the disclaimer at the bottom of the landing page: “This Web page is parked FREE, courtesy of GoDaddy”
The idea that GoDaddy is doing this as a “courtesy” is humorous to me because the company is monetizing its customer’s domain name with PPC links and by charging prospective buyers “$69.99+ commission**” to utilize the Domain Buy Service to purchase the domain name. In fact, some registrants may believe this is discourteous if GoDaddy were to monetize their landing page with trademark infringing links that induce a UDRP (or worse).
Domain registrants should understand that their registrar may display pay per click links on their domain name landing pages if the registrar default nameservers are retained and used. This is not limited to GoDaddy – other registrars monetize their customers’ domain names as well. I thought it was funny that GoDaddy’s messaging comes across as if the company is doing a favor to its customers rather than the other way around.
Great analysis Elliot.
I don’t understand how the most popular domain service has maybe the worst UI experience and is so outdated compared to others. Without much competition I guess its easy to ignore the little guy.
Microsoft, Google, and Facebook run the Transatlantic Undersea Optical Cable from Virginia Beach to Spain. What does that say about London and New York? It says BT (British Telecom) and CBS (Viacom) need to be kept as far away from the terminals as possible.
I looked at screenshots for this domain dating all the way back to 2010 via DomainTools and the landers said the exact same thing. “This Web page is parked FREE, courtesy of GoDaddy” Most had PPC links and even the DBS offering was a thing all the way back in 2010. So, 10 years and really only a few layout/design changes once and awhile was interesting.
I missed that. The greater focus on monetization with pay per click advertising combined with the removal of the GoDaddy logo was what caught my attention. In my opinion, the added focus on pay per click advertising adds risk to customers, likely without their knowledge.
Even more humorous is that Amazon acquired (not sure if registered, bought, seized…etc) AmazonHalo.com, which is registered at GoDaddy. The same landing page appears along with Amazon links. In essence, when someone clicks one of those links, Amazon is paying Google to send traffic to its website from a domain name it already owns, and GoDaddy is making money because Amazon did not change the default nameservers:
https://twitter.com/DInvesting/status/1299007974086782977
Amazon registers domain names at GoDaddy to help hide them, while being forward thinking to brand protect. The mentioned domain transferred to MarkMonitor today to note and was very likely registered by Amazon back in May 2019. I do not agree with the PPC links personally to note.
GD is not a innovative company and they are not spending any money to update the UI and technology…
The Q is…why should they?
Regards,
BullS
MBA,PhD
Magna cum laude
Graduate of Domain King Academy
MBA-My Big Ass(all of you have one)
PHD-people having dickheads
GoDaddy first order of business is following the intellectual property, to it’s furthest extent when the money trail has long forked in another direction. GoDaddy innovates by collaborating with core infrastructure developers at MIT, Verisign, and Neustar on a non exclusive basis. GoDaddy walks every time with free code, most importanly…all of it.
In 2010, Verisign sold authentication business unit – which included Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, public key infrastructure (PKI), Verisign Trust Seal, Verisign Trust Seal, and Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) services – to Symantec, which eventually changed it’s name back to NORTON. All of this technology, GoDaddy has it and they didn’t have to buy it from or merge with Symantec.
What Symantec didn’t realize at the time, is Verisign sold the same Certification Authority to Neustar as well. Symantec can’t limit Verisign sales to one unit.
There are much more facts, the pronouns once you hear them are undeniable, delivery take some of energy, and curiousity takes most of it. Later.
NortonSymantec is now LifeLock. LifeLock is for people too lazy to use a different UserID/Password for each platform. What if LifeLock got bought by Ancestory.com?
That’s why GoDaddy and Neustar kept a copy of everything Symantec bought from Verisign.
The best thing to do now is squeeze the crap out of LifeLock, till their uselessness becomes apparent.
In 2015, the Federal Trade Commission charged LifeLock “failed to establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program”, and “falsely advertised that it protected consumers’ sensitive data”. The FTC obtained a $100 million monetary penalty against LifeLock to settle the contempt charge. Of that fine, $68 million is to be held for class-action refunds to LifeLock customers.
NortonSymantec rescued LifeLock by infusing the company with a 10 year old Verisign technology. Then Symantec guts it’s 300-Person CyberSecurity Services selling the unit to Broadcom which in 2020 reached an agreement to sell the programmer division to Accenture. Accenture in 2020 completed it’s acquisition of AWS (Amazon Web Services)
GoDaddy, Neustar, and Verisign would never sell themselves to Accenture nor would they buy components of Amazon, which in the case of AWS equals buying back technology that originated at Verisign.
It’s only a matter of time before LifeLock locks itself out.
In the future, I will carefully explain what Austin, TX was really and who was responsible for luring so many people there. In the 70’s, Austin was a city where runaways fled to if they could not handle the demands of living in Dallas. If you left Dallas with $5000, you start over in San Antonio. If you left Dallas or San Antonio with nothing, you’d flee to Austin.
Very little goes on in Dallas that I’m not aware of.