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, even when the look and feel is that of Dan.com.
My opinion is that it’s not yet time to ditch Dan for Afternic overall, as the latter has yet to eradicate some persistent bugs and glitches.
Dan.com offers a “Make Offer” option that does not exist on Afternic—any negotiation requires the use of the “Inquiry” lander. Also, Afternic does not allow the direct communication between buyer and seller, another problem for those that don’t want to negotiate carte blanche for a number of good reasons.
Lastly, in recent weeks I began using Google Analytics on my Dan.com listed domains.
This option required switching from domain landers to portfolio landers, killing two birds with one stone: The frustrating SSL/firewall issue is thus eliminated and one gets to see valuable metrics provided by Google Analytics. You can watch this video below for some guidelines on how to implement your Google Analytics code on Dan.com:
Overall I am waiting for the next “Dan” to appear and there are a couple of contenders in the works, one at Spaceship and another at Saw.com.
The latter is probably the most interesting one as it’s under development (beta) by the very capable team that built the legendary Uniregistry Market under Frank Schilling‘s command.
As with everything else in life, it’s good to have options and what works for me might not work for others—that is the beauty of the domain investing game.
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