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Comment by jhonovich | Hacker News Reader

They are losing money... and lots of it. Wow.

GoDaddy has been around a long time, one would think they would be profitable (at least barely) by now. And they are going public with this?

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How did they get into a situation where they're losing >$200M per year -- and with only $100M cash in bank and $1B revenue? Even more perplexing... they recently took on $1B+ in debt, of which they immediately paid out 30% as a dividend to investors?!

I'm not an expert or anything... but their "growth" story stinks; it looks like they're just trying to milk a dying cow. That, or I'm just way off base...

This smacks of a firm being raided by private equity funds. Leverage, debt use it to do a stock divident to the owners (Private Equity firms), launch an IPO, use the IPO funds to finance more debt, keep the company above water long enough to walk away.

Also the current CEO is a former Yahoo! exec, not exactly confidence inspiring.

Being a domain registrar is a terrible business. This is why GoDaddy has all those upsells.

Nope. They were profitable prior to the buyout. Besides they don't make money on the domain registration they make it on selling other things (that you don't need in many cases) the domains are just an acquisition tool on that. A loss leader.

They also have a domain buy service. A domain sale I just handled which came by that service netted them a $6000 fee for essentially contacting the other party (who I worked for) by email. (Don't use them would be my very strong suggestion.)

>Besides they don't make money on the domain registration they make it on selling other things (that you don't need in many cases) the domains are just an acquisition tool on that. A loss leader.

Those are the upsells I'm talking about.

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