Afternic is a ghost platform, operated by GoDaddy. It was a dedicated web site where both sellers and buyers could interact, buying and selling domains respectively. A few months ago, GoDaddy disabled the ability of buyers to search the Afternic domain inventory directly. That search was replaced by the same search form that one can use on GoDaddy.com to find and register domain names. By moving the Afternic search to GoDaddy.com, the company gave up its multi-year attempts to fix an ageing platform. Its original concepts of a plan for Afternic 2.0 did not include a deadline; it was an open-ended commitment that was never truly binding. What GoDaddy achieved was to litter its domain search with a stream of worthless second and third tier domains recommended by its buggy AI. … [Continue reading]
Concepts of a plan: How Afternic’s ever-beta platform became the norm
Dan.com: It’s still a great platform to sell domains on
Today, GoDaddy announced the availability of native LTO landing pages on Afternic, replacing the "Dan style" landers that it offered there. The timing is odd, considering that I've been testing the waters at Afternic as far as LTO deals go. These transactions at Dan.com eat up banking fees as Dan sends payouts via international wire; meanwhile, GoDaddy-owned Afternic charges 90 cents per ACH transfer to US bank accounts. For reference, that's free at Escrow.com. When an LTO plan takes 12, 18, 24, 36, or more months to complete, every payout instance incurs those fees that can be as high as $20 dollars. With 15% of the transaction being fees, one can see why Afternic's LTO is a better choice. Afternic has confirmed that LTO transactions taking place there are handled by the platform, … [Continue reading]
GoDaddy expired domain acquisitions: A long leap of faith
After 25 years of using GoDaddy as a domain registrar on an as-needed basis, I'm not surprised by the lack of effective process logic. Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to the biggest domain registrar in the world was the acquisition of Uniregistry; a massive domain portfolio paired with expert talent able to broker domains and to produce clean processes and code. The Uniregistry techs were known for utilizing feedback swiftly and for rolling out updates in a fast cycle fashion. Not so much at GoDaddy, a much bigger company that appears to be unwilling to acknowledge its failing points. But enough of this long intro and onto the main course: Acquiring expired domains via GoDaddy is a process that could be improved, quite a lot actually. After paying $50 for an … [Continue reading]
Domain industry evolution: Global Domain Report | 2024 edition
Fresh from Sedo and InterNetX arrives the Global Domain Report for 2024. It's not just a pretty bundle of information and charts; it's the quintessential representation of the domain industry's … [Continue reading]
Negotiate with BuyDomains via Sedo if you can
The art of negotiation is a learning process and domain investors benefit from such knowledge, both for financial reasons and for the purpose of overall engagement. In a recent transaction that … [Continue reading]
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