Running $3 Million dollar 30 second ad commercials during the Super Bowl® is not in every bodies ad budget, let alone to run 2. Nor is being the main sponsor on major race cars like Danica Patricks #7 Indy car, #7 Nationwide Series car, Mark Martins #5 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup ride and all the other things GoDaddy.com sponsors! Then we have all the pretty ladies, aka GoDaddy Girls® that need some cash, $500K to Haiti etc.
So what is one way that GoDaddy makes a TON of money IMO? It’s not by people registering domain names, it’s when their customers do not Renew Them!
Expired Domain Name Auctions!
GoDaddy.com is one, if not the only domain name registrar that solely runs domain name auctions on expired domain names in-house. If it’s not the only, it’s by far the largest and most profitable! With the help of it’s marketing over the years, GoDaddy has grown to a huge market share of domain name registrations and the amount of domain names the company manages! Like nearly 50% huge! With over 80 million domain names registered worldwide, that’s a huge number!
The expired domain name market is a big market and for GoDaddy, the products being sold cost them NOTHING! Their customers pay for the domain names, the fees it cost to transfer the domain names to the registrar etc. If the customer does not renew the domain name in time, 25 days after the expire date the domain names goes into public auction directly on GoDaddy.com.
A 10 day auction takes place and more time is allowed for the past customer to renew but if that doesn’t take place, the auction winner get’s the domain name and GoDaddy not only get’s all the money from the domain auction, the new customer pay’s for the domain name renewal. Then if the domain stays at Godaddy, it holds the chance the same domain may repeat the process in a year!
So big deal right? What are expired domain names selling for? $10? In some cases it is $10, but I would like to get $10 for pretty much nothing as well. How about the ones that sell for a couple hundred? That happens nearly every couple of minutes, every day, every week and every month!
As fast as you could add them up, the auctions keep ending in a fully automated process.
Heck, some of these expired domain names are selling in the Ten’s of Thousands of dollars! Today I watched HDMICables.com end for $17,005 USD. That is ONE domain auction that ended today. Thousands and thousands more will end today and many with bidders! Even smaller expired domain auctions like iTattoo.com that ended for $570 keep adding up every second as auctions keep on ending and new ones start! All free inventory for GoDaddy!
It is hard for me to put an exact number on how many Expired Domain Auctions are running on any given day at GoDaddy, but I think it is easy to say in the Tens if not Hundred’s of Thousands total. You can view the expiring domain auctions on Godaddy.com and just keep clicking next page, and next and next even showing 500 results per page and just going and going and going. There are a lot of expired domain auctions happening!
Yes GoDaddy allows it’s customers to sell there owned domain names using it’s auction service for a % of the auction, but the real money is being made on the expired domain auctions! Again, this process is fully automated and the domains being auctioned cost GoDaddy $0.
If you would like more information about Godaddy domain name auction process and how things work, you can read an article I wrote by clicking that link. This is vital information if you are interested in a specific domain name or simply have questions about how things work.
Clearly GoDaddy is doing very well with many of it’s other products and services they offer, but Expired Domain Auctions is likely one that is often overlooked and is a true profit maker for them. I would love to have one day’s worth of profit coming out of GoDaddy Auctions!
but some names still drops from godaddy and infact they snagged by backorder in pool. why such case ?
February 6th, 2010