Not really hundreds of thousands of dollars. They already have the money and none of it gets transferred to the new registrar.
If you move a domain name from Godaddy to Hover that has five years left before expiry, I have to support you for the next six years (the original five, plus the extra year that gets added when you transfer) for the $10 transfer fee I charge you when you initiate the transaction.
Its kind of screwed, but that's the way this industry works.
You can make the argument that transferring out affects Godaddy's future revenues, but to what extent isn't exactly clear.
Regardless, you make a great point - the brand took a hit, its a real thing and they really didn't like that this happened. I'm just not sure how financially material the action actually was.
The domains that I'm not sure about using all get registered on a yearly auto-renewing basis. That's most of my domains. I'd assume that most domains are registered that way, which means that it's probably at least half a million in yearly gross revenue that just went away for each of the coming years, not counting any services that went with those domains.
Edit: Assuming that that headline is accurate and that's a net loss attributable to this whole fiasco. Also, I'm sure their profit margins on domains are razor thin, so the profit lost might be pretty low.
If you move a domain name from Godaddy to Hover that has five years left before expiry, I have to support you for the next six years (the original five, plus the extra year that gets added when you transfer) for the $10 transfer fee I charge you when you initiate the transaction.
Its kind of screwed, but that's the way this industry works.
You can make the argument that transferring out affects Godaddy's future revenues, but to what extent isn't exactly clear.
Regardless, you make a great point - the brand took a hit, its a real thing and they really didn't like that this happened. I'm just not sure how financially material the action actually was.