As of February 1st, Afternic, Dan, and the Uni Market impose a 25% “head tax”—they call it “market alignment fee”—for domains that are using alternate DNS servers.
In other words, if you use your own landing page for BobsSpectacularDomains.com to capture traffic and the domain sells on Dan, Afternic, or the Uni Market, one of these fine GoDaddy companies will eat your lunch at a 25% rate.
It is ridiculous seeing GoDaddy, a company that makes millions of dollars selling domain names and is supported by the activity of domain investors, has decided to keep 1/4 of their profit!
This despicable action has a new twist, as experienced by a very active domain investor whose recently expired domain name sold at Afternic.
“Afternic hit me with a 25% because domain was pointed to registry, as it had just expired. While I think this is very Unfair, since I wasn’t using a different sales lander, this is a PSA for some of you. Make sure you renew good names on time before expiry without waiting.”
What happened: The domain’s DNS was changed to the default nameservers of the Neustar Registry at expiration. Although one can renew the domain for several days later, that DNS change scored an automatic claim to the 25% fee by GoDaddy’s ingenious “market alignment.”
In a nutshell: If you have domains listed with a BIN price and they go as much as one day past expiration with their DNS changing, once they sell at Afternic, Dan, or the Uni Market you will be forking out the 25% “head tax”—thank you very much!
