Domain Name Wire wrote a fantasy football article today, suggesting that GoDaddy should consider picking up the dot .ORG Registry, as a “white knight.”
Setting that impossible scenario aside, as .ORG is not up for grabs in any kind of auction, here’s why this is a terrible idea.
We already know the minimum cost of acquiring the .ORG Registry: $1.135 billion dollars. To come up with a better offer, let’s say 20% higher, GoDaddy would have to fork out $1.362 billion dollars.
That’s all cash.
GoDaddy stock is currently trading at $66.02 dollars – well below its April 2019 peak of $81.75 dollars. They would have to liquidate 20.6 million shares to come up with that number.
Although GoDaddy has a market capitalization of 11 billion, the average daily volume of trading is 1.5 million shares. If they were to trade up and cash 13.6 times that amount, the stock value would promptly crash through the floor. That, assuming that 20.6 million shares are in GoDaddy’s hands.
Fantasy stock trading aside, here are some additional reasons why GoDaddy touching .ORG is a horrendous idea:
- GoDaddy is already a behemoth of a corporation, with a monolithic structure. Adding a Registry branch would require setting up a separate, self-managed entity, that would be proven to work and function as well as an existing machine, PIR. It’s not possible to do this in a matter of weeks or months, simply to gamble on acquiring a legacy Registry.
- GoDaddy makes its bulk earnings from add-on services: web hosting, SSL certificates, and cookie cutter design services. While adding 10 million .ORG domains under management sounds appealing, the majority of these domain operators are start-ups and non-profits with their own active branding strategies, or domainers with no need for added services. That’s possible with the tens of millions of .COM and .NET domains under GoDaddy’s registration, however.
- GoDaddy would have to persuade ICANN that they can deliver better and cleaner than Ethos Capital – a well-funded player that has no other interests in the game – other than receiving the scorn of being a purely capitalist investment fund. But GoDaddy already has its hands in multiple jars, including the auctions of expired domains, and a domain aftermarket and brokering service. These interests cross-pollinate each other and the end-result would be as clean as Richard Nixon’s hands right before the Watergate.
Lastly, don’t believe that GoDaddy was doing domain investors a favor, when they dropped Uniregistry gTLDs. That myth has already been debunked, but since DNW claims that GoDaddy was all angelic in their action, here are the hard facts from 2017.
In conclusion: GoDaddy would not be a “white knight” by usurping the .ORG Registry, but quite the opposite.
GoDaddy resembles a T-Rex – Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
Setting aside that you can never think critically about Uniregistry, you should consider doing at least a rudimentary review of finance. They don’t have to sell shares to make an acquisition. It’s called debt.
Andrew – Are you disputing what happened in 2017 between GoDaddy and Uniregistry? Sorry to see that you still can’t accept the facts and maintain an agenda, using your anti-Uniregistry / pro-GoDaddy bias in an argument unrelated to Uniregistry. Do a rudimentary research on that.