This past weekend Go Daddy topped the 50 million domain name mark when the domain “dbakit.com” was registered.. Go Daddy's closest competitor is eNom recently reported that it had 11.9 million domains under management at the end of June.

Go Daddy says that it registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second and since it began registering domain names it has registered more than 225 million years worth of domain names. (domains registered for one year and then dropped are one year, if it’s renewed for a year then it becomes two years and so on). Since January 2010, Go Daddy has grown by 10 million domains, while the entire domain market has grown by 23 million.

Go-Daddy in a deal reportedly worth more than $2bn, sold more than half of its shares to a group of private investors including KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures, which made former CEO, founder Bob Parsons a billionaire as well as “the great white hunter of elephants”!

There have been other consolidations in the industry with Network Solutions being picked up by smaller rival Web.com for $561m and UK Group NBT going private in a £153m deal.

With ICANN posed to massively liberalize the top-level domain market, many domain holders will be forced into registering numerous extra domains to protect their brand, a fact that probably wasn't overlooked by investors of these acquisitions!