In the summer of 2007 I spent $40 to buy the domain HitPig.com on a domain forum. It had a fun alliteration quality about it and loosely reminded me of the game Whac-A-Mole. The domain remained parked for years, barely earning its renewal fees every year but I was too fond of the name to drop it. In August of last year I renewed HitPig.com once again and within days I received an inquiry and a $200 offer on Dan.com. I declined and countered with $2,500 but did not hear back. By the end of the month, Dan was done, with domain investors' portfolios moving to Afternic. In late October I received an offer for $1,500 dollars but it didn't happen on Afternic! The Dan exchange had remained active, allowing the buyer and I to continue negotiations. A quick search revealed that it was … [Continue reading]
Afternic marketplace: Two month update disappoints
A good 60 days into using the Afternic marketplace as a "forced" transition from the now defunct Dan.com, I'm about to present my personal experience and the results aren't great. The first 30 days looked promising, to be honest. After clocking two months I have one positive thing to say: The sheer amount of inquiries, as compared to Dan.com, is mind-boggling. You can thank the infamous "registrar path" for that. While I had almost 50 inquiries that were dealt by GoDaddy brokers, I scored only one sale during the second month - and that domain was using Dan.com nameservers still. It's a good indication that while such sales are "legitimate" and will only cost you 15% in fees, it's advisable to ensure all your domains listed on Afternic use its ns1/ns2 pair of nameservers. From … [Continue reading]
A praise for Afternic
As a domain investor, I've never used Afternic intentionally before to sell domains. It was always due to GoDaddy acquiring Uniregistry and Dan that I got to experience a range of annoying woes of being on the Afternic platform as a domain seller. As a domain buyer, I was far less concerned about the lack of bells and whistles and I did use Afternic for that purpose without any issues. After deciding to give Afternic a test run for 30 days, I have to say I'm far from being disappointed. The transition of my domain portfolio from Dan to Afternic took place without any major issues, although I had to hand-verify a dozen domains by using my allocated DNS - a trick that Dan used to perfection. In the two weeks or so since, I've had approximately 10 leads and one domain sale. The latter … [Continue reading]
eNom: End of an era & the fastest domain transfer ever
Twenty-two years ago I opened an eNom account as a subseller, allowing me to register domains at a lower price. It also gave me other benefits, such as registering and managing domains for … [Continue reading]
Dan.com: The final exodus
Migration is not a great word to use when forcing the end of life of a service that was useful to many. In the literal sense, migration reeks of physical violence and war turmoil, of broken … [Continue reading]
Recent Comments