Forbes article about GoDaddy
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
Forbes published an article about GoDaddy and the prospects of domain registrars.
The article is a good summary and points out that registrars make very little money on domain registrations. The article focuses on another revenue source — revenue from parked domains. In this case it’s domains registered at GoDaddy that the owners aren’t doing anything with. These domains resolve to GoDaddy parking pages fed by Google ads.
The article quotes Dotster chairman Kevin Kilroy, who is also trying to grow his registration business. Jay Westerdal of Name Intelligence (which put on last week’s successful Domain Roundtable conference) came to the defense of the domain registration business, arguing that registrars with at least 100,000 domains can be successful.
Absent from the article are details about how much registrars are currently making from webhosting and other product add-ons. I’ve always assumed that webhosting was as big as advertising revenue. If GoDaddy goes public we might get more details on the economics of domain registrars. The only major public registrar right now is Tucows, which plays a lot in the domain wholesale business. Network Solutions and Register.com were public but have been taken private.
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