The sale of Thoughtful.xyz was shared on X by Swetha Yenugula, India’s prolific domain name investor.
In that post, Swetha commented on the fact that the sale, which took place on Afternic, was hit with a particularly huge commission that went to GoDaddy’s digital pockets:
“Another costly hit.”
The sale of Thoughtful.xyz for $64,888 dollars was diminished by 30%, resulting in net earnings of $45,421.60. The 30% commission was the result of two devious and distinctively anti-domainer charges that GoDaddy implemented on its network, the 25% automatic charge for not using GoDaddy-approved DNS and 5% to use the so-called Afternic Boost. The latter is a choice, unless you meant to turn it off and forgot about it.
Swetha Yenugula
In other words, the domain was acquired by someone who went to GoDaddy.com and searched for the Thoughtful keyword, receiving a “boosted” suggestion for the .XYZ TLD. The top search result, Thoughtful.xyz, was presented as a “Promoted Premium” domain with the option to acquire. The buyer did just that.
As Swetha had set the domain’s lander to resolve via Spaceship‘s DNS, Afternic marched in and collected its exorbitant fees. There are a couple of lessons to be learned here.
First and foremost: There is trust in the GoDaddy.com brand as a registrar of choice. Reg path searches can lead to sales—unless one has ensured that their domain is not listed for sale via Afternic and its distro network. When a domain+TLD is searched on GoDaddy but isn’t listed for sale on Afternic, a note to acquire it shows up, typically with an image of the so-called Japanese broker.
What happens next is anyone’s guess but we’re convinced that buyers looking to buy a specific domain would either search for it in Google or type it in. Now here comes the fun part: Searching for an Afternic-listed domain using Afternic’s DNS in Google returns zero results. Which means, that to get auto-forwarded to it on mobile devices is impossible: the domain does not exist in Google’s index to begin with.
This is because Afternic-listed domains using Afternic-approved nameservers get de-indexed from Google eventually, as they serve http headers with low value content to Google. Eventually, Google removes these domains from its index, a costly penalty for anyone holding brandable domains or even generic ones. The domains get re-indexed once they are listed for sale on a different platform, such as SAW.com, Spaceship, or Sedo. These platforms serve proper http headers along with usable content, such as domain descriptions. Getting re-indexed takes time and some domains might not fully recover their previous rankings.
So here’s the challenge: Listing your domains on Afternic with its approved DNS might land you sales but the experience will depend on the GoDaddy brokers and how they communicate vital information about your buyers.
If you prefer to negotiate this can be an excruciating experience. If you prefer to list your domains with a BIN price, keep in mind that buyers can still bypass that lander and communicate with GoDaddy brokers in an attempt to make lowball offers. The end result is more frustration, because GoDaddy permits this type of behavior by design.
If you choose to list your domains on Afternic but keep the DNS under your control, your results might be better; depending on the platform of choice whose landers you’re using, you will get lower commissions, a different distro network, and more or less intel about your buyer; however, you’d be in control of negotiations the entire time. You end up paying lower commissions, if the domain sells via your landers. If, however, the domain sells on Afternic you are royally screwed, as in the case of Thoughtful.xyz.
Swetha Yenugula is an intelligent, experienced domain investor with many sizable sales under her belt. The loss of 30% of a single domain’s earnings isn’t that big of a hit compared to her total earnings of millions of dollars; still, it’s a sizable amount of money that would have ended up in her own bank account instead of GoDaddy’s.
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