Founded in 1997, GoDaddy.com, the flagship company of the GoDaddy Group, now manages more than 9 million domain names. The company has seen exponential growth recently, due to the boom in blogs and personal web pages. According to data from Technorati, a blog search engine, there are an estimated 70,000 new blogs a day, many of which require their own domain names.
Since GoDaddy is a private company, finances have not been disclosed, but experts predict an IPO could surge the value of the company to more than $250 million.
“There are reasonably high renewal rates for domain names, which provides pretty good visibility for these types of businesses,” Thanos Moschopoulos, an analyst at BMO Nesbitt Burns, told MarketWatch. “This does seem to be a growth market, and GoDaddy has grown a ton in the past year.”
The ICANN-accredited registrar rose to public prominence in 2005, when it ran its risqué Super Bowl ad. The TV spot, which was cancelled after the single airing, shows a scantily clad model experiencing a wardrobe malfunction while she testifies before a fake Broadcast Censorship Committee.
"There are a lot of companies that don't necessarily know if they can be independent companies," Andrew Schroepfer president of Tier 1 Research told WHIRnews.com. "So a lot of them end up going through the process to find out from their bankers what other companies would consider buying them for."
Accounting firm Deloitte & Touche ranked Go Daddy the 20th fastest-growing technology firm in its 2005 rankings. In the past few years, GoDaddy.com has taken the lead from Network Solutions in registering domain names.