Go Daddy Software, the eight-year old Arizona company that entered the domain business in November 2000, overtook NSI approximately April 17, according to RegistrarStats.com and other analysts that track the industry.
Go Daddy announced yesterday that it surpassed Network Solutions in total domain names under management, to become the world’s No 1 ICANN-accredited domain name registrar for the .com, net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us domain extensions.
According to RegistrarStats, Go Daddy has recently been netting between roughly 5,000 and 15,000 new domains per day. NSI, meanwhile, has been netting a few thousand new names per day, but purges tens of thousands at weekends.
Go Daddy had 6,902,946 domains under management as of Monday this week, up from less than 6 million three months earlier, according to RegistrarStats, compared to NSI’s 6,818,607. Third-placed Tucows Inc had 4,210,537.
The main reason for Go Daddy’s rapid rise to the top is fairly straightforward. It charges $8.95 for a .com name per year, while NSI charges $34.99, as it has since it the company first started charging for domain names a decade ago.
NSI’s monopoly was broken up by the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers in 1999. NSI was bought by VeriSign, which kept the less troubled registry business, but then sold off to private investors in late 2003.
While Go Daddy has been rapidly moving up the ranks almost since inception, recently its business was helped by paying over $2m for a 30-second ad spot during the Super Bowl, featuring a well-endowed woman having a partial wardrobe malfunction in front of a committee of stuffy conservative politicians.
Midway through the game, a scheduled second showing of the ad was censored by Fox and the NFL, which created the kind of publicity most advertisers can only dream of. The brief commercial was estimated to be among the most successful Super Bowl ads ever.
