Who the heck is GoDaddy and why should I care?

If you were one of the zillions of folks tuned into the Super Bowl on Sunday, there’s a good chance you saw GoDaddy’s (cough) controversially great commercial. What’s controversial, IMHO, is that this is controversial at all. What’s great is that it shows that the dotcoms can still break the barriers of boring ads.

The commercial left half the world asking: what does GoDaddy do?

The answer is simple (sort of): GoDaddy is now the world’s best known domain name registrar. Even better, they’re known for their cheap domain name registration services.

Through much of the early Internet boom, Network Solutions held the exclusive keys to the domain name vault … and they charged dearly for access. GoDaddy was one of the companies to break that stranglehold on the market. NetSol got away with charging a whopping $35 per year for their domain name registration services. Once GoDaddy and the rest of the inexpensive domain name registrars rode into town, the market rate was slashed to a mere fraction of that.

“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore”
– Mark Twain

By lowering the price of domain name registration, the wheels of commerce, progress, and speculation were fully greased for the great Internet land grab.

So now that you can register a domain name for the price of a handful of lottery tickets, what are you waiting for?

“Suppose you were an idiot.
And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself”
– Mark Twain