GoDaddy going global

In this interview with Blake Irving, CEO of GoDaddy, he mentions the company’s focus on expanding global reach:

We’re localizing, globalizing and marketizing our code base which means we’re building software for specific languages and markets.

Take Spanish, for example. It’s spoken differently in places like Chile, Mexico and Peru, so we’ll make investments in currency, payment types, unique graphics and vernacular for each market we go into.

Here are the country websites currently supported:

GoDaddy country websites

Naturally, I’d love to see this global gateway promoted to the header (it’s currently buried in the footer).

But the website nicely uses language negotiation to make its Spanish-language website more discoverable.

If your web browser is set to Spanish you’ll see this overlay when you visit:

Go Daddy Espanol

What isn’t mentioned in the interview is GoDaddy’s support for non-Latin domains (aka IDNs). I suspect that GoDaddy will be investing heavily in marketing IDNs around the world as well.

I’ve long maintained that IDNs have been slow to take off in many markets not because they don’t offer users value but because the ecosystem around IDNs have not been well developed. By globalizing the registration platform, GoDaddy is doing its part to improving the IDN ecosystem.

PS: This is a picky thing that drives me nuts. Is it “Go Daddy” or “GoDaddy”? I see it both ways on the home page. The Wall Street Journal uses “GoDaddy” so I’ll do the same.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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