iEstates.com

Please note that the following is a parody intended for April Fools day 2011.

Bob Parsons, CEO of domain registrar Godaddy.com, announced today that his 2012 vacation hunt will be to Peterville, Illinois where Parsons will go on a kitten hunting expedition. Parsons, an avid hunter, recently posted videos of his 2011 hunting vacation in Zimbabwe where he helped local farmers kill a problem elephant.

This time Parsons will have his work cut out for him. “Kittens are really fast animals and really small” says Bob. “I’m going to need at least a 50 cal for this hunt.” The city of Peterville, population 723, has provided Parsons and his 20 person safari team with permits, right of way, as well as the key to the city. In addition to being rid of these problem kittens, the residents of Peterville will be provided with free Asian cuisine, and free Godaddy.com tube tops. Franklin Campbell, the Mayor of Peterville, talked about the problem “They (the cats) claw up the arms of chairs, they poop in sand boxes. One even drank milk right from Ethel Taylor’s milk bucket. It’s just a mess over here.”

When questioned about the need to hunt kittens Parsons stated “There are occasions all over the world where people fall prey to these kittens. Problem animals need to be killed and Peterville needs our help.”    PETA officials recently named Parsons the Scummiest CEO of the Year, but have yet to respond to this recent news.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (1)

DNN received several reports during the Super Bowl that Godaddy had removed Premium Listings from being displayed.  Elliot’s Blog made mention of this possibility and today we received confirmation from Paul Nicks, Director of Godaddy Aftermarket, that the company did indeed pull Premium Listings during the Super Bowl.

Nicks confirmed that the listings were removed but were quickly put back in to play . He assured DNN that the Premium channel would benefit from much of the post-game marketing blitz that Godaddy is conducting even still.

Nicks told DNN

“It is true that for a small portion of time around the airing of the two commercials, the Premium Listing service was static. GoDaddy.com optimizes the site to handle the crush of web traffic coming to us for Super Bowl ads. People were visiting the site to see the Super Bowl commercials and that’s what we provided, a secure, safe and solid website.”

Godaddy has been making strides to become a player in the domain aftermarket and the chance to benefit from the traffic from a Super Bowl ad obviously would be very appealing to anyone selling in the aftermarket.  Godaddy even issued a statement on January 31st touting the Super Bowl ad timing as a great time for customers to “leverage the Super Bowl Glow” to sell through the Premium Listings.  While one would have assumed the best time to benefit would have been during the ad rush, it looks like Godaddy considers the timing before and after the Super Bowl ads to be the “Super Bowl Glow”.

Nicks continues,  ”An exciting element to consider, one we did not tout in our news release, is the amount of publicity that would drive visitors and potential customers to our website in the days preceding the game. Go Daddy clips and commercials were shown on network news programs, syndicated entertainment programs and discussed in major print and online publications, starting January 31st.  Many highlighted Go Daddy’s successful strategies and history with driving traffic to the website. This helped our Premium Listing customers in ways we did not predict.”

“We are exceeding our own expectations for web traffic today, following the game and our Premium Listing service is certainly benefiting from increased exposure. Last night’s commercials are generating a tremendous amount of publicity today, as critics discuss the ads. We are also executing a  major media tour in New York City right now with our new GoDaddy.CO Girl, Joan Rivers. We expect her talking about domain names in the mainstream media will help sustain interest beyond this morning.”

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (4)

According to a note sent by GoDaddy staff to press, yesterday at 6:02pm M.T., The Go Daddy Group, led by flagship registrar GoDaddy.com, now manages more than 45 million domain names on the Internet. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and employs nearly 2,900 people.

Currently, Go Daddy is registering, renewing or transferring a domain name every eight-tenths of a second. The company is larger than eight of its closest competitors combined.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com (9)

The newest proposed and supposedly final version of the ICANN new TLD applicant guidebook brought some unexpected changes and questions such as the sudden dropping of the requirements of registry/registrar separation.

As pointed out by industry watchdog George Kirikos on the ICANN forum the changes in the new gTLD guidebook block any entity from applying for a new TLD that has lost more than three UDRP proceedings. The arbitrary rules seems to have been added in order to block specific applications, especially from domain investors who have been target of UDRP proceedings. Unfortunately the decisions in these proceedings have been less than impartial in the past.

Interestingly enough it seems that the changes to the new TLD application could for example bar registrars GoDaddy (through their subsidary “Standard Tactics LLC”) and eNom/Demand Media from applying for new TLDs, as they have lost more than 3 UDRPs in the preceding four years.

As pointed out by The Domains, this change also affects the registrar Tucows, which has lost more than three UDRPs.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

As WSJ reports, the private auction for domain registrar and hosting company GoDaddy was broken off last week while some potential buyers were performing due diligence.

Potential bidders, including private-equity firms General Atlantic and TPG, were called last week and told the auction was off, the people said, leaving the interested parties hanging in the middle of due diligence. General Atlantic, which owns GoDaddy.com’s smaller competitor, Network Solutions, may have partnered with a couple of other buyout shops to make an offer, one of the people said. Now those efforts are over

The bidders in the second round of the auction were well enough equipped to meet GoDaddy’s asking price tag of 1.5 to 2 Billion USD. None of the bidders was informed as to the reasons why the auction was pulled.

Editor’s Note: The pulling of the auction seems similar to the withdrawal of the IPO the company in 2006.

[via Wall Street Journal]

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

Top 20 Aftermarket Domain Name sales at GoDaddy over the last 30 days.

GoDaddy was so kind to provide us with their top 20 sales over the last 30 days. Top domain in this month was DDirt.com, which sold for $100,000 USD.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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Remember when GoDaddy filed to go public? And then canceled their IPO? According to what the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) writes today, they are giving it another go: Apparently Qatalyst Partners, the boutique firm run by veteran technology banker Frank Quattrone has been retained by GoDaddy to offer the company in an auction that private equity firms are expected to bid in. According to “people familiar with the matter” quoted in the WSJ the auction could fetch as much as $1 Billion USD.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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GoDaddy.com announced with a Press Release that they launched Video.me, a new video sharing site. With the launch of the site, the site, GoDaddy steps beyond their normal operations of a registrar, so it is very interesting to see how they will fair competing with the likes of YouTube. The domain name chosen reconfirms the company’s commitment for the .ME ccTLD, which it operates in partnership with Afilias and MeNet.

From the Press Release:

Video.ME addresses these issues by adding simplicity and flexibility to the upload process, and gives users complete control over their content – whether they simply want to store their videos ‘in the cloud,’ invite specific people to watch them or broadcast to the whole world.

Each video has the option to be password protected, giving the user control over who sees it— even if the clip is added to Facebook or another website.

[...] Videos can be any length, there is just an overall weekly storage limit of 500MB.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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Today sees the launch of a new drop-related services by the name of NameCatch, which we found via an announcement by user Erdinc on Namepros. Similar to FreshDrop, the site provides domain drop lists from a number of websites and allows you to sort and filter them by a number of criteria, such as languages and patterns. The subscriptions are based on the filters you would like access to and start at $3 for a 10 day subscription for searches that start or end with specific up to 50 keywords.

From their site:

NameCatch.com provides information on domain names, particularly expiring domains that go to auction. We scan big lists of domains every day for dictionary terms in different languages as well as word patterns such as consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV).

We provide advanced search features which enable users to enter up to 50 search terms to do a bulk search on expiring domains. Most domain auction sites allow searching for one term at a time. If you have a list of multiple search terms and you want to check a few different sites, typically SnapNames.com, NameJet.com and GoDaddy.com, this can be a daunting task to do on a daily basis. But with NameCatch.com you can do it with a single ‘Search 50′ button.

NameCatch has also a domain tracking service. Whether you have a small list or a larger list of domains that you are interested in, you can enter these names to your ‘Track 10,000′ list and we will scan them for you every day and email you if any of them goes to auction.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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Please note that the following is a parody intended for April Fools day 2010.

After being blasted by the NewYork Post over issues with their domain back-order services, GoDaddy agreed today to completely overhaul the services.  By having multiple customers pay $18.99 to back order the same domain, only to face each other in an online auction for the same domain, the company believes this is “not delivering value to our customers”.

Bob Parsons said in a statement “While I was bathing in the milk of 1000 coconuts last night, I got a call from Danica about this issue. At first I was like ‘Hey, sweetie, you stick to beating the boys in the cars and leave the serious business to us real men’,  but then I started to see her point.  To make up for it, we are going to let any affected members come to our office and participate in a first annual Dunk Danica event on April 1st between 3pm and 5pm.”

If you are a Godaddy member who has paid for a backorder only to have it end up in an auction, head on down to try your luck at dunking Danica in the Godaddy Dunk Tank.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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