Surprising to read between 800-900M 2009 revenue and a price tag of 1B.
IIRC, registrars pay on the order of 25 cents a domain, which they then resell for $8 or more, and GoDaddy is the registrar for something like 1/4 of all .coms. Web hosting and email are very high-margin too.
Why has there not been some disruptive registrar selling .com's for, say, $4? Whatever the operating costs of being a registrar are, it seems like they should be no more than $1/domain-year. So if a registrar dropped their prices to $3 or $4 and grabbed half the market out of it, they'd post huge profits.
Obviously those numbers are just guesses, but I highly doubt that it really costs $9/year to host a domain at scale.
Different biz I know but both are ultimately subscriptions.
Buying a domain is a subscription (you pay annually) and they cross-sell you on a bunch of other "enhancements". It's also pretty sticky for the vast majority of domain holders.
That type of recurring revenue is valuable. Salesforce is a subscription as well. GoDaddy prob doesn't deserve a p/s of 10 like 10 but 1 seemed low. That is what i was pointing out.
Not sure why I got down-voted but sorry to someone at Salesforce who I offended :)