GoDaddy now making over $1 billion a quarter
It doesn’t seem like five minutes ago that GoDaddy became the first domain registrar to top $1 billion in annual revenue. It was actually 2013. Now, it’s doing that in a quarter.
The company last night reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.02 billion, almost half of which was from domains, up from $873.9 million a year earlier.
Domains revenue was up a whopping 23.6% at $497.3 million, but this was mainly due to aftermarket sales and the registry business.
The company does not report its domains under management, growth or renewal rates in its quarterly earnings announcements.
CFO Mark McCaffrey told analysts that up to two thirds of the growth could be attributed to the aftermarket, where domains sell at premium prices, and GoDaddy “saw an uptick in both volume and average deal size”.
He also highlighted GoDaddy Registry as a key growth contributor, due to the launch in Q4 of a “reputation protection solution” that I can only assume refers to the AdultBlock service that blocks trademarks in the company’s four porn gTLDs.
GoDaddy sent out renewal notices for AdultBlock, valued at as much as $30 million, in December.
It’s not currently possible to measure the success of AdultBlock from public data sources. GoDaddy expunged the roughly 80,000 blocked .xxx domains from its zone file on December 1. Whereas they previously resolved to a registry placeholder, now they do not resolve at all.
Domains revenue for the full year was $1.81 billion, up 19.5%. Including non-domains businesses, annual revenue was $3.81 billion, up 15%.
The company had 2021 net income of $242.8 million, reversing a loss of $494.1 million in 2020.
If you find this post or this blog useful or interestjng, please support Domain Incite, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.
Being a registry is hella profitable.
Since they bought such business, the ROI is not as much so far. Registries are usually profitable when starting from a small initial investment.