About GoDaddy

GoDaddy Inc. (GoDaddy) delivers easy-to-use cloud-based products, outcome-driven, personalized guidance and ease and access to payment systems. The company’s services are designed to meet and attract them in all phases and across all aspects of their business. These phases are iterative in nature; customers are constantly revisiting different stages of their journey to improve and grow. Wherever the company’s customers are in their journey, whether they are choosing a domain name or establishing a physical store, online presence or a social media platform, the company is there to enable them to create content, build their website, establish and manage their online marketing, sell their products and services, process their payments, syndicate marketplaces online and offline, connect social media and manage their businesses with branded email, productivity solutions and website security. The company’s customers often start with the most intimate of brand considerations, their identity, which it provides through its domain services. As their entrepreneurial needs evolve, the company helps its customers manage and grow their businesses and connect with their customers through its expanded service offerings and access to relevant third-party products and platforms, including website building and hosting, marketplace syndication, social media and bio site management, security, business products and email and other services. The company’s customers need to integrate dynamic information everywhere they engage with their audiences, including customer touchpoints, such as appointment availability, retail inventory, digital subscriptions and social media. Recognizing that consumer expectations and behaviors are quickly changing, the company evolved its product and service offerings to provide a high-performance back-end registry technology platform and an integrated suite of payment systems and point-of-sale hardware and software to seamlessly manage online and offline commerce. Customers and Solutions The company has built to serve its customers by providing simple, easy-to-use products on a single technology platform wrapped with personalized guidance. Customers The company’s largest customer population, Independents, consists mostly of micro-businesses and noncommercial endeavors. The company’s second largest customer population, WebPros, are website designers and developers who build websites on behalf of businesses and noncommercial organizations. The company estimates that half of all global website builds occur through a third party, such as the company’s WebPros, on a do-it-for-you basis. WebPros are often freelancers, moonlighters or teams within website design agencies that often have website design as one of multiple streams of income. WebPros generally have more technical acumen and look for tools that provide greater amounts of flexibility, such as the company’s WordPress content management system (CMS). The company supports a variety of control panels and content management tools favored by WebPros, including cPanel, Plesk, Drupal, Joomla and more. The company’s third largest customer population is Domain Registrars and Investors. Domain registrars are organizations that have their own domain registration offerings, but who use its domain registration and management platform. These commercial arrangements provide for strategic relationships with many key platforms and enable further scale of the company’s domain registration technology and insights. Domain investors are individuals or organizations who manage a portfolio of registered domains for the purpose of selling via secondary markets. These investors bring a unique and valuable resource to the company’s business in the form of liquidity and the ability to help its other populations (Independents and WebPros) successfully find a domain name they prefer. The company also serves other Registrars and Corporate Domain Portfolio owners. The company’s third largest customer population is Domain Registrars and Investors. Domain registrars are organizations that have their own domain registration offerings, but who use its domain registration and management platform. These commercial arrangements provide for strategic relationships with many key platforms and enable further scale of the company’s domain registration technology and insights. Domain investors are individuals or organizations who manage a portfolio of registered domains for the purpose of selling via secondary markets. These investors bring a unique and valuable resource to the company’s business in the form of liquidity and the ability to help its other populations (Independents and WebPros) successfully find a domain name they prefer. Solutions The company has designed and developed an extensive set of easy-to-use technology products to enable its customers to establish a digital identity, connect with their customers across multiple platforms and online marketplaces and deliver a seamless customer experience in a connected commerce world. The company’s domain name registration products enable it to engage customers at the initial stage of establishing a digital identity and often are an on-ramp for its other products. The company’s hosting and presence and business applications products significantly improve its value proposition to customers, increase its revenue and margin growth opportunities, can serve as starting points for its customer relationships and improve customer retention. The company’s omni-commerce payments platform and GoDaddy Payments recognize its customers' needs. The company’s payments solutions enable its customers to quickly and easily participate in the digital economy with a seamless transition to offline marketplaces. The company has also made significant investments in the localization of its service offerings, as 47% of its customers are located in international markets (notably the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India and Australia). And, while not a standalone product, the company’s GoDaddy Guides consist of approximately 6,200 specialists worldwide who are available 24/7/365 and provide care to customers who have different levels of technical sophistication. Segments The company operates through two segments: Applications and Commerce; and Core Platform. Applications and Commerce (A&C), which primarily consists of the sale of products containing proprietary software, commerce products and third-party email and productivity solutions, as well as the sale of certain products when they are included in bundled offerings of the company’s proprietary software products. Core Platform (Core), which primarily consists of the sale of domain registrations and renewals, aftermarket domain sales, website hosting products and website security products when not included in bundled offerings of the company’s proprietary software, as well as the sale of products not containing a software component. Applications and Commerce segment GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, Managed WordPress hosting, GoDaddy Studio and other GoDaddy offerings are a part of a customer's ubiquitous presence that enable anyone to create a simple, easy-to-use website or e-commerce enabled online store, for both desktop and mobile, with minimal technical skill. The company’s products enable its customers to be found online by helping to enhance the information on their website and extending their website and its content to where they need to be, from search engine results (e.g., Google) to social media (e.g., Meta) to vertical marketplaces (e.g., Yelp), all from one location. Applications Products The company’s primary applications products include: Websites + Marketing: Websites + Marketing is an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself, mobile-optimized online tool that enables the company’s customers, irrespective of their technical skills, to build effective websites and e-commerce enabled online stores. The company offers a variety of plans, with pricing dependent on business and marketing features. With each of these plans, customers have access to industry-targeted professional design templates, which can be further customized using the company’s editor by adding intent-driven sections, photos, videos or text. The company’s design templates cover a wide range of categories with professionally written content for small businesses, organizations, families, weddings and other ideas. The company’s websites and tools are all designed to work seamlessly on mobile devices, with a focus on performance, to enable websites to appear in search engine rankings. In addition, it includes Payable Domains, a default payments system that creates a frictionless, out-of-the-box experience for the company’s customers. Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce: Managed WordPress is the company’s streamlined, optimized hosting platform that allows its customers to build and manage a faster and more secure WordPress site. With the company’s Managed WordPress site, it manages the administrative tasks for its customers, allowing them to spend more time on building or growing their business. The company’s Managed WordPress sites are built with enhanced security, automatic, daily backups and core updates, integrated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), one-click migration tools, pre-installed extensions, plugins and themes, business email and backups and a staging site. The company also offers its Managed WordPress Hosting Platform with WooCommerce, giving its customers the freedom to sell anything, anywhere online, from physical products to digital downloads, services and subscriptions. Digital Marketing: The company offers a range of marketing tools and services designed to help businesses acquire and engage customers and create content. These capabilities are available in an integrated offering with the company’s website and commerce tools, or as a stand-alone offering for customers using other website content-management systems. The tools are designed for busy customers who may lack experience with online marketing, focusing on ease of use, mobile experience and delivering business results. For example, the company’s mobile application, GoDaddy Studio, allows its customers to grow their brands by easily creating impactful visual content for almost any online platform. Search Engine Optimization helps the company’s customers get their websites found on major search sites using a simple step-by-step wizard with targeted recommendations on which search phrases are most likely to drive traffic to a customer's site. Business listings capabilities bring business information to where customers are looking, including Meta and Google My Business. Email marketing lets customers build targeted campaigns, either from scratch or using website or commerce content. Social Media Marketing helps customers create ads and boost brand awareness through a complete ‘do-it-for-me’ service for managing engagement on the most popular social networks. This service combines dedicated teams of branding experts – photographers, writers, designers, marketers – with proprietary technology to manage activity on Meta, Twitter and Yelp, among others, to help the company’s customers acquire new customers and build stronger relationships with their existing customers. Connected Commerce The company’s commerce products are designed to help its customers sell online, in person and on leading marketplaces, while being able to manage their sales from one place. In addition to robust commerce capabilities, the company offers the lowest card transaction fees in the industry when compared to other leading providers, which allows its customers to keep more of what they make. The company’s primary commerce products and services include: Online Store: The company’s Websites + Marketing product includes online store capabilities, which allows its customers to transact business directly on their websites. Online store capability is easy to use and offers powerful commerce features with templates for websites that are optimized for mobile shopping, integrations with GoDaddy Payments and the company’s Smart Terminal POS system, inventory and product catalog management, and growth tools for marketing. It also allows customers to sell on leading marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Google) and social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram), with all channels managed from the company’s Commerce Hub. In addition, in 2022 the company released Managed WooCommerce Stores, which is a high performance and highly flexible WordPress online store targeted at established businesses looking for a powerful connected commerce solution to scale their online and in-store businesses. Similar to the company’s Websites + Marketing product, Managed WooCommerce Stores includes its Commerce Hub, marketplace selling and is integrated with GoDaddy Payments and its Smart Terminal POS system. Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems: The company offers a countertop Smart Terminal for businesses with in-store operations. The company’s Smart Terminal is a modern, dual screen all-in-one POS system that allows its customers to manage in-store inventory and product catalogs and take payments. In addition, the Smart Terminal seamlessly integrates with both the company’s Websites + Marketing Online Store and Managed WooCommerce Store to unify in-person and online sales so businesses can offer ‘Buy online pick up in-store’ experiences to their customers. The Smart Terminal also offers access to vertical-specific third-party applications. In addition to the company’s Smart Terminal, it offers other payment acceptance solutions that allow its customers to take payments their way while seamlessly interacting with their customers wherever they may be. The company’s Card Reader allows customers to take payments and sell on the go. The company’s Virtual Terminal allows customers to take payments from their smartphone, tablet or computer with internet connection with no hardware needed. The company’s customers also have the ability to take online payments without needing to create a website through its shareable pay links. Customers can brand and personalize these shareable pay links with their domain or other marketing, giving them another opportunity to build their brand. Pay links can be sent through text or email or shared on social media sites. The company also offers payment services through the GoDaddy Mobile App, which not only powers its Card Reader, but allows its customers to accept payments through their smartphone by using a QR code that their customers can scan to pay. GoDaddy Payments: As a ‘payment facilitator,’ GoDaddy Payments enables the company’s customers to accept all major forms of payment, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and contactless payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, with no long-term contracts or monthly minimums. This service enables the company’s customers to start accepting payments in minutes with a simple setup and get paid, in many cases, as early as the next business day all with the lowest fees in the industry when compared to other leading providers. In addition, GoDaddy Payments is built-in as a payments acceptance method in all the company’s U.S. commerce products for easy enablement. Email and Productivity Solutions The company’s customers want to spend their time on what matters most to them, selling their products and services or helping their customers do the same. The company provides them with productivity tools, such as domain-specific email, SmartLine second-line telephony, online storage and payment solutions to help run their ventures. The company offers a variety of products designed to make the business of business easier for its customers. The products the company offers include those developed in-house, as well as third-party applications which it distributes and supports, such as Microsoft Office 365. The company’s primary email and productivity solutions products include: Email Accounts: The company offers a range of email service plans with a multi-feature web interface that connects to its customers' domains. The pricing of these plans depends on the customer's desire for additional features, including HIPAA compliant email, advanced email security, archiving, and additional business applications, such as Microsoft Bookings and Microsoft Teams. All of the company’s email accounts are ad-free and include security functionality designed to provide protection from spam, viruses and other forms of online fraud, such as phishing. Microsoft Office 365: The company offers fully-supported Microsoft Office 365 accounts that are easy to set up and use with its customers' domains. The company offers Microsoft Office 365 through multiple plans ranging from email with calendar and contacts connected to a full suite of productivity tools, including file sharing and full desktop versions of Microsoft productivity applications, such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For customers wanting to protect their email data, the company offers an email backup service, and for customers needing to comply with regulatory requirements, it offers email add-on services, such as HIPAA-enabled email, encryption services (in partnerships with ProofPoint and Inky), archiving services (in partnership with Barracuda) and advanced e-mail security. The company helps make Microsoft Office 365 installation easy, allowing customers to get up and running in minutes, including ‘do-it-for-me’ migration services to move customers' existing email data to Office 365 accounts. Core Platform segment Domains GoDaddy is the leading global domain naming service. The company provides its customers with the broadest selection of domains and high-quality search, discovery and recommendation tools to help them find the right name for their idea. The company is a global leader in domain name registration, with nearly 84 million domains under management as of December 31, 2022 and, based on information reported in VeriSign's Domain Name Industry Brief, the company held 24% of the approximately 350 million domain names registered worldwide as of September 30, 2022. As of December 31, 2022, approximately 92% of the company’s customers had purchased a domain from it. In addition, GoDaddy Registry provides a high-performance back-end registry technology platform with a portfolio of TLDs, including .biz, .co, .nyc, and .us. The company’s primary domains product offerings include: Primary Registrations: Using the company’s website or mobile application, it offers customers the ability to search for and register available domain names with the applicable registry. The company’s inventory for primary registrations is defined by the number of top-level domains (TLDs) it offers. As of December 31, 2022, 424 different generic TLDs, such as .com, .net and .org, and 58 different country code TLDs, such as .de, .ca, .in and .jp., were available for purchase through GoDaddy. Since 2013, hundreds of new gTLDs have been launched through ICANN's ‘new gTLD program’ initiated in 2012 (the Expansion Program), making it easier for companies and individuals to find and register new, easy-to-remember domain names tailored to their ideas, industry or interests. ccTLDs are important to the company’s international expansion efforts as it has found international customers often prefer the ccTLD for the country or geographic market in which they operate. The company’s primary registration offering relies heavily on its search, discovery and recommendation tools which enable its customers to find a domain name that matches their business needs and goals. The company also sells domain registrations through relationships with third-party resellers and it provides back-end registry services supporting more than 215 TLDs. Aftermarket: The company operates a large domain aftermarket platform, which processes aftermarket, or secondary, domain name sales. The company’s aftermarket platform is designed to enable the seamless purchase and sale of previously registered domain names through an online auction, an offer and counter offer transaction or a ‘buy now’ transaction, and automation and lease to own options for its customers through Dan.com. The company maintains a portfolio of more than 1.2 million previously registered domains, providing a diverse inventory available to its customers. The company’s GoDaddy Investor mobile application helps investors watch and bid on domains at auction and stay on top of their current bids from their mobile devices. The company operates a cross-registrar network that automates transaction execution across registrars thereby reducing the time required to complete a transaction. Domain Name Add-Ons: Domain name add-ons are typically purchased concurrently with domain name registrations and have low costs associated with their delivery. In addition, where permissible, privacy features are included at no cost with every domain registered with GoDaddy. Domain names with privacy features are registered on an ‘unlisted’ basis to help protect personal information, deter domain-related spam, and allow the company’s customers to confidentially secure a domain for an unannounced product, service or idea. Registry: GoDaddy Registry is a world-leading provider of domain name registry services. GoDaddy registry operates or provides back-end registry services to more than 200 TLDs, including country-code TLDs, such as .us and .co, city TLDs, such as .nyc and .sydney, generic TLDs, such as .club, .tv and .design, and branded TLDs, such as .chase and .godaddy. the company’s integrated registry solutions provide policy and operational support, and domain marketing, sales and strategic planning. Hosting and Security For more technically sophisticated web designers, developers and customers, the company provides high-performance, flexible hosting and security products that can be used with a variety of open source design tools, as well as Managed WordPress. The company designs these solutions to be easy to use, effective, reliable, flexible and at a great value. The company offers a variety of hosting and security products enabling its customers to create and manage their digital identity, or in the case of WebPros, the digital identities of their end-customers. The company’s primary hosting and security products include: Shared Website Hosting: The term ‘shared hosting’ refers to the housing of multiple websites on the same server. Shared hosting is the company’s most popular hosting product. The company operates, maintains and supports shared website hosting in its owned and operated data centers and its leased co-located data centers using either Linux or Windows operating systems. The company offers several tiers of website hosting plans to suit the needs and resources of its customers, a majority of which use industry standard cPanel or Parallels Plesk control panels. The company also bundles its hosting plans with a variety of applications and products, such as web analytics, SSL certificates and WordPress. WordPress is the most used content management application on its shared hosting platform. Website Hosting on Virtual Private Servers and Virtual Dedicated Servers: The company’s broad range of virtual private server (VPS) offerings allow its customers to select the server configuration best suited for their applications, requirements and growth. The company’s VPS solutions provide its customers with a single virtual machine which runs multiple other virtual machines for other customers. The company’s VPS is designed for customers who need greater control, more advanced technical capabilities and higher performance than that offered by its shared hosting plans. The company’s customers can tailor their VPS plans based on a range of performance, storage, bandwidth and operating system needs. Managed Hosting: With its managed hosting products, the company sets up, monitors, maintains, secures and patches software and servers for its customers. The company offers a variety of managed hosting plans to support its customers' needs, including multiple tiers of Managed WordPress hosting on a platform optimized for WordPress. The company also offers other managed environments that span across its VPS products like Joomla, Drupal and Magento and apps like Gallery. Security: The company’s security product portfolio is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help secure its customers' online presence. The portfolio includes public key infrastructure (PKI) and SSL certificates to help ensure information is secure between browsers and servers through encryption; the use of a content delivery network (CDN) to improve a website's performance; a proprietary web application firewall (WAF) to help keep customers' websites safe from hackers; continuous malware scanning and site cleanups; and a skilled team of security professionals to provide incident responses in the event of a disruption in service. Marketing GoDaddy is one of the most recognized Internet brands in the U.S. with high brand awareness globally. The company has established this high level of brand awareness primarily through its advertising campaigns across various platforms, including television commercials, print, online and billboards, and have supplemented these advertising campaigns with its own entrepreneurial customers and social media influencers. The company complements its brand marketing efforts with focused and metric-driven direct response marketing to acquire new customers. The company uses a variety of targeted online marketing programs for lead generation, including search engine marketing, search engine optimization and targeted email and social media marketing campaigns, as well as more traditional direct marketing and indirect channel partner marketing programs, to drive interest in it products and traffic to its websites. As part of this effort, the company regularly runs campaigns simultaneously and constantly refine its media mix across its channels. As of December 31, 2022, the company had approximately 9.9 million customers outside of the U.S. and derived approximately 32%, of its total bookings from international sales in 2022. The company has built a dedicated team responsible for the internationalization and localization of its core product offerings, as well as its customer care and marketing efforts. In conjunction with the company’s localization efforts, it added on-the-ground regional teams and increased its country and regional specific marketing spend. These investments enabled the company to successfully launch and expand its business outside the U.S. and as of December 31, 2022, the company provided localized products and customer care in 54 markets around the world. Competition The company’s competitors include providers of domain registration services and web-hosting solutions, such as Identity Digital (formerly Donuts and Afilias), United Internet, Namecheap, Newfold Digital, Automattic and WP Engine; website creation and management solutions, such as Shopify, Squarespace and Wix; commerce capabilities, such as Block, BigCommerce, Stripe and PayPal; cloud-infrastructure services and online security providers, such as CloudFlare, Comodo, Let's Encrypt, LiquidWeb and SiteGround; alternative web presence, social platform and marketing solutions, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Mindbody, Toast, TikTok, OpenTable and Yelp; and productivity tools, such as business-class email, calendaring and messaging, such as Google, Grasshopper, Microsoft, WeChat, WhatsApp and Zoho. In addition, the company faces competition from Tencent. Regulation The company’s business is subject to regulation by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), federal and state laws in the U.S. and the laws of other jurisdictions in which the company does business. The company is accredited by ICANN as a domain name registrar and registry and thus its ability to offer domain name registration products is subject to its ongoing relationship with, and accreditation by, ICANN. Intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights As of December 31, 2022, the company had 353 issued patents in the U.S. covering various aspects of its product offerings. Additionally, as of December 31, 2022, the company had 9 pending U.S. patent applications and intends to file additional patent applications in the future. History GoDaddy Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in 2014.