Domain Name Wire

Brilliant: Bob Parsons to Keynote DOMAINfest

By Andrew Allemann

December 2, 2010

Go Daddy founder to give keynote presentation at DOMAINfest.

I didn’t see this coming, but it’s brilliant: Go Daddy founder Bob Parsons will keynote February’s DOMAINfest Global conference in Santa Monica.

DOMAINfest is run by Oversee.net, which owns Moniker. Go Daddy is certainly its #1 competitor for domain registration. Go Daddy is the biggest domain name registrar and manages perhaps 20 times as many domains as Moniker. But DOMAINfest is an industry conference, and Oversee.net has done a good job making it not just about them. Numerous competitors sponsor the event. This helps solidify that.

I believe this is the first time Parsons has attended a domain name industry event since Domain Roundtable over 5 years ago. Having Parsons at the event will do a few things:

-Bring more mainstream attention to the conference; Go Daddy is the company in the industry that gets the most mainstream press.

-Ensure that more Go Daddy employees attend. They’re hit or miss at conferences (Bob has said he’s not a fan of tradeshows). Surely he’ll bring an entourage. (Hopefully he sticks around for the Playboy Mansion party. It seems right up his alley.)

-Help solidify that it’s an industry conference; not just an Oversee conference.

This is frankly one of the first keynotes in a while that I’m interested in seeing. Parsons is not a one-hit-wonder. He sold off his last business to Intuit, and now has created a business worth over $1B.

Brash and egotistical? Sure. But show me someone with his success who isn’t.

I’ve only talked to Parsons twice, and both were related to the same thing: Standard Tactics. You might imagine they were uncomfortable conversations, but they really weren’t. The first was shortly after I published my story on Standard Tactics, and the second was on his live radio show. I came away impressed. I’m sure he would have rather me not expose Standard Tactics, but he made some changes immediately afterward. For example, my story had pointed out that Go Daddy was effectively bidding against its customers by raising the starting bids for high traffic expired domains. He said he hadn’t looked at it that way before and would change it immediately. Then on his radio show he announced he was shutting down Standard Tactics’ operation. He even brought a bit of humor — albeit with spin — to the situation.

Bottom line: Parsons is the most successful person in the domain name industry. This was a smart move by Oversee.net, a smart move by Go Daddy, and a keynote everyone should attend.

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Tags: bob parsons, Domain Registrars, DomainFest, go daddy, oversee.net