If we as domainers remove our domains one by one there will be no game to be played and they will be left holding their balls!!!
I think we're assuming that they *
care* about the business of domainers at all. The margins are pretty small for customers who mainly buy .com's (I'm guessing), and know to look for the coupons or use the discount club, etc - compared to "regular" customers who maybe own a few domains, a couple hosting plans, some emails... but are paying max price and max renewals for everything. <-- I think those are the people they like, not us.
Look at all of their marketing, it's never targeted towards domainers, it's always small business owners who don't know any better. "How GoDaddy helps small business owners succeed..." They aren't talking about domainers.
When every price they list has to include an * because it's misleading, that's a pretty big red flag.
Get your new .com for only $2.99*.
Maybe it's because I come from the marketing/dev/SEO side of things, a hosting-buyer, but my impression for almost a decade has always been that GoDaddy is for people who don't know any better yet. It's almost like a rite of passage to have a bad experience with them. When we see someone using GoDaddy hosting, it's our moral duty to help them transfer away. I guess it's a bit different on the domaining side, or at least it was at some point, because I know some very established investors who are very happy with GoDaddy. Or at least, they were until now.
I think we're all trying to figure out why they aren't doing better for domainers, but maybe the premise is flawed.
It's a lot easier to understand why it seems like GoDaddy doesn't care about domainers, when you don't take it for granted that they even do care. Why would they?
Active domainers are less likely to pay the extra $20 for privacy, to overpay for subpar hosting plans, to buy all the other bells and whistles, to get gauged on year 2 onwards because they don't know about transferring their site elsewhere, or getting locked-in on proprietary nonsense and held hostage.
They probably make more money from one regular small business customer who just wants a website and email for their flower shop, than they make off any random sample of 100 domainers. So if 100 domainers decide to leave, who cares? They'll still use GoDaddy auctions, they'll still use Afternic to get more exposure for their names, they'll still get named pushed to their GD account and end up having to renew them occasionally.
I'm just making this up based on a hunch, I don't have any data to back this up, but would they really care that much if
every single NamePros user transferred away? I'm not saying it's not a ton of names, but it just seems like everything else they sell has much higher margins than selling .com renewals for $8.29/yr. If Verisign price is $7.85, that's a few cents per name per year, plus the payment processing fees eating into most of that, anyways. Granted, they also make money for the discount club membership dues, but I think the point stands that they aren't really printing money off the backs of domainers.
I guess at the end of the day, big domain portfolios are basically buying high-volume of a product that seems like it's essentially a loss-leader, then threatening to take their business elsewhere, and wondering why GoDaddy doesn't seem to care.
*but you have to buy two years upfront, and the second year will cost you your first born, a rare flower that only blooms atop the world's most active volcano, and an amulet that's been lost at sea for 10,000 years.