Scenes from a four million dollar holiday party.

Go Daddy held its annual holiday party at Chase Field in Phoenix on Saturday evening.

In this video you’ll see some highlights from the night. You’ll also wonder if the event really took place at Chase Field. It looks more more like an amusement park to me.

Here are some highlights from the video:

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons gave some interesting stats on what happens at Go Daddy every minute:

-75 domain names are registered, transferred, or renewed
-43 customers call the call center
-13 email or forwarding accounts set up
-SSL certificate sold
-2 hosting account sold
-30 URLs shortened with x.co shortener

Not bad.

Other highlights:

-Go Daddy gave out a lot of money during the event, including a $500,000 charitable donation to the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDs. The money will establish the “Go Daddy Women’s Health Center” at Southwest Center’s new community health and education facility.

-There were many celebrities in attendance, including Go Daddy girl Danica Patrick.

-Musical performers included Jewel (who sang a Go Daddy song), ZZ Top, and George Thorogood.

-Employees who missed the party because they had to work got four times their pay for the night plus a $250 bonus.

Go Daddy founder to give keynote presentation at DOMAINfest.

I didn’t see this coming, but it’s brilliant: Go Daddy founder Bob Parsons will keynote February’s DOMAINfest Global conference in Santa Monica.

DOMAINfest is run by Oversee.net, which owns Moniker. Go Daddy is certainly its #1 competitor for domain registration. Go Daddy is the biggest domain name registrar and manages perhaps 20 times as many domains as Moniker. But DOMAINfest is an industry conference, and Oversee.net has done a good job making it not just about them. Numerous competitors sponsor the event. This helps solidify that.

I believe this is the first time Parsons has attended a domain name industry event since Domain Roundtable over 5 years ago. Having Parsons at the event will do a few things:

-Bring more mainstream attention to the conference; Go Daddy is the company in the industry that gets the most mainstream press.

-Ensure that more Go Daddy employees attend. They’re hit or miss at conferences (Bob has said he’s not a fan of tradeshows). Surely he’ll bring an entourage. (Hopefully he sticks around for the Playboy Mansion party. It seems right up his alley.)

-Help solidify that it’s an industry conference; not just an Oversee conference.

This is frankly one of the first keynotes in a while that I’m interested in seeing. Parsons is not a one-hit-wonder. He sold off his last business to Intuit, and now has created a business worth over $1B.

Brash and egotistical? Sure. But show me someone with his success who isn’t.

I’ve only talked to Parsons twice, and both were related to the same thing: Standard Tactics. You might imagine they were uncomfortable conversations, but they really weren’t. The first was shortly after I published my story on Standard Tactics, and the second was on his live radio show. I came away impressed. I’m sure he would have rather me not expose Standard Tactics, but he made some changes immediately afterward. For example, my story had pointed out that Go Daddy was effectively bidding against its customers by raising the starting bids for high traffic expired domains. He said he hadn’t looked at it that way before and would change it immediately. Then on his radio show he announced he was shutting down Standard Tactics’ operation. He even brought a bit of humor — albeit with spin — to the situation.

Bottom line: Parsons is the most successful person in the domain name industry. This was a smart move by Oversee.net, a smart move by Go Daddy, and a keynote everyone should attend.

Domain registrar to continue tradition of big holiday parties.

The latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has a story titled “The End of the Office Holiday Party” that prominently features domain name registrar Go Daddy.

The article starts off by mentioning that Queen Elizabeth II canceled this year’s Christmas Party, saying it wouldn’t be right to throw a lavish party while asking everyone else to cut back.

But there’s one company that’s not cutting back, and it’s right here in our industry. Go Daddy will again return to Chase Field in Phoenix for its annual shindig. Over 6,000 people are expected to attend the December event including Go Daddy Girls race car driver Danica Patrick, personal trainer Jillian Michaels, singer Ella Koon, and poker player Vanessa Rousso. Company founder Bob Parsons has also lined up three major bands to perform.

Parsons told Bloomberg Businessweek that he will dole out $1 million in cash to company employees during the party.

“I’ll give away a million bucks by pulling names out of a hat. And when I give money away, I pay the taxes on it,” he says. “I don’t want to be the richest guy in the graveyard.”

Not bad.

World’s largest domain name registrar supposedly no longer for sale.

The Wall Street Journal, which originally reported that domain name registrar GoDaddy was for sale, is now saying the company is off the market.

The Journal reports that the sales process was cut off last week. A number of private equity companies were in the mix, and the story suggests a sale price of $1.5 billion to $2.0 billion was possible.

So Bob Parsons will continue to control the company. He just made another move that he wouldn’t be able to do (under the company’s name) if he sold out: Go Daddy recently donated $1 million to the George W. Bush presidential library. Go Daddy founder Bob Parsons isn’t shy about leaning to the right.

Although I suppose Parsons could easily make a donation by himself instead of on behalf of the company.

Attack juxtaposes conservative candidate with “porn domain name seller”.

A political attack ad by a group known as “Coalition for Iowa Values” is going after an Iowa Republican congressional primary candidate by associating him with Go Daddy’s Bob Parsons.

The ad goes after Rob Gettemy, whom Parsons is supporting in the primary, by juxtaposing Gettemy’s supposed “values” against video of Go Daddy girls shedding their clothes.

The video is titled “Who’s Your Daddy”. It labels Parsons a “porn domain name seller” and says “Maybe someone should tell Rob that Congress has enough people with GoDaddy.com values”.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a conservative group has gone after Parsons. It has given the company a lot of free press, such as when Morality in Media sent out a press release urging parents to view the company’s Super Bowl commercials before they aired.

The ad also goes after Gettemy for profiting from his religious t-shirt company IM4JC. Gettemy registered the domain name IM4JC.com at GoDaddy but it has expired. Gettemy used GoDaddy’s domain ownership protection product, so the domain name hasn’t been deleted. Hey Rob, give Bob a call to get your domain name back up.