GoDaddy CEO: We bought Media Temple to 'win the hearts and minds of developers'

Web hosting giant GoDaddy has acquired Los Angeles based Media Temple.

This is GoDaddy’s sixth acquisition in just over a year.

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Both Media Temple and GoDaddy offer web hosting services. However, Media Temple has a much stronger reputation among professional developers and designers. “We have not done a great job with that customer segment,” GoDaddy chief executive Blake Irving admitted in a phone interview.

According to Irving, the company is pursuing the “polar opposite strategy” to Yahoo when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. Media Temple will not be shut down in the wake of the announcement. Instead, it will continue to operate independently out of the LA offices with no real day-to-day changes for employees or customers.

However, Media Temple president Russ Reeder said he expects to take advantage of GoDaddy’s global presence in the coming months. “Our goal is to expand our recognition with developers internationally,” he told me.

This acquisition is part of GoDaddy’s broader strategy to win over the small- to medium-sized business segment. “We want to win the hearts and minds of developers, so it made sense to build this relationship out,” Irving said.

In the past 16 months, GoDaddy has also acquired Locu, Outright, M.dot, Ronin, Afternic, and SmartName, which are all web services targeted to small businesses. In most cases, these startups have continued to operate their services — in other words, they haven’t just been talent acquisitions or “acqui-hires.”

Irving and Reeder would not reveal any of the financials, including the final sum for the acquisition.

Media Temple could not have come cheap, given that it has been around since the late ’90s, serves more than 125,000 brands, and raised just over $15 million in venture financing. Media Temple counts The Wall Street Journal, IBM, and Starbucks among its customers. Irving stressed that GoDaddy has set aside a “huge sum of money” for its mission to build the world’s leading platform for small businesses.

GoDaddy now serves more than 12 million paying customers and employs nearly 4,000 people.

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