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. Worthless in the literal sense, as some are priced at pennies or dollars, all while Afternic sellers’ domains either appear well below those results or not at all. The search has turned into a doomscroll of crap that might appease a potential registrant on their quest for a domain which arrived with a price matching its established value.
Domain investors complained about this new reality of being topped by domains that were available to register. The next move by GoDaddy was to roll out its Afternic Boost program for 20% of a sale’s proceeds. By increasing its 15% standard commission to 20%, GoDaddy enrolled automatically everyone using the Afternic platform into its Afternic Boost tier.
In other words, a 33% increase of fees collected was forced under the pretext of a value-added service, which by the way arrived without a guarantee. GoDaddy’s launch of Afternic Boost stated that its estimates for increased performance was not a binding promise for sales increasing.
Currently, many domain sellers that use Afternic and its Afternic Boost variant complain about how unstable the platform has been, particularly since the introduction of features and landers available at Dan.com originally. It seems that Afternic’s perpetual beta status simply moved under the general GoDaddy.com umbrella, as opposed to a separate platform. But both instances are equally bad as far as domain sellers are concerned.
A lot of domain investors do praise the “registrar path” sales that are the result of searching for a domain at GoDaddy.com and buying the best match through it. GoDaddy’s power lies in the 85+ million domains registered with it. GoDaddy is often seen as synonymous with domain names, when in fact it’s just a domain registrar like hundreds of others – but it’s by far the biggest and most known one.
Realistically, selling domains through the Afternic ghost platform offers more eyeballs than other platforms due to the registrar path opportunities it presents. But GoDaddy has made it extremely difficult to even predict if a domain appears as expected in someone else’s search, whether its lander will display the expected price, or if the potential buyer will give that lead to a GoDaddy broker waiting to receive a call at the phone number that’s displayed below the domain and its BUY button. The seller has very little control of its own domain asset’s marketing.
The GoDaddy ecosystem seems to encourage domain sales that are “easy” to close, particularly in the sub-$10,000 dollar territory. In my opinion, domains priced in the $2,500 – $4,999 range are the bread and butter of GoDaddy’s Afternic sales. Anything above that range requires a lot of effort, time, and negotiation skills; GoDaddy brokers appear to be going after increased volume of sales, not increased average sales. The latter was the Uniregistry model.
We are left with a platform that’s actually GoDaddy.com which conceals its inadequacies with the gargantuan GoDaddy brand. No platform is perfect, truth be told; what GoDaddy’s Afternic has done though is keep itself “good enough” to keep on chalking up sales. And that is another demonstration of how “concepts of a plan” are preventing those with a real plan from becoming #1.
In dear memory of Uniregistry and Dan.com.
Personally I use Name.com for domain registration and host sites elsewhere