GoDaddy acquired Dan.com for $71.4 million dollars with one goal in mind: to pipe out its 2 million listed domains to Afternic.
The aged platform has many automated domain-selling features in place but new tech at Dan, previously known as Undeveloped.com, was eating Afternic’s lunch, as far as sales volume is concerned, prior to the acquisition.
Ultimately, spending $71.4 million in cash means that GoDaddy can transform Dan.com however it wants and it already did so by raising the standard fees from 9% to 15% on February 1st.
Users of Dan.com have the option to enable a switch that sends their domains to Afternic. The integration is a one way street apparently, as news shared by domain investors show.
The operator of Laskos.com stated that domains listed via the Dan integration with Afternic don’t disappear from the latter if a user of Dan turns off the integration, eventually. These domains remain at Afternic at prices that don’t receive any further updates from Dan.com, which can lead to sales taking place at a different price point.
The real shocker is the fact that the Dan integration with Afternic doesn’t utilize a domain lister’s existing account at Afternic. These domains can only be controlled from within Dan.com, just like the sad case of the UniMarket integration into Afternic: Domains can not be edited via an Afternic account, and domain prices are set to a “default” value when the UniMarket listing doesn’t include a BIN price.
If you enable @Afternic listing for your domain on DAN, that domain will not be listed on Afternic under your main account but will be listed through the integrator.
In this case features, such as Fast transfer and Make offer will not be available.#domains pic.twitter.com/ndb1I5nADJ
— Bogdan Vovchuk 🐺 (@bogdan_vovchuk) February 26, 2023
GoDaddy claims that its Afternic service is valued at 25% of a domain’s selling price, using this argument to refer to the price increase of the Dan.com and UniMarket fees to 15% as a “discount“—a numerically false claim.
The only price discount that took place on February 1st on GoDaddy-owned marketplaces is that of Afternic fees, down to 15% from 20%.
“domains listed via the Dan integration with Afternic don’t disappear from the latter if a user of Dan turns off the integration”
Theo, this has been fixed. Thanks.
James – Thanks. Can you confirm that when integration is turned off, all linked domains get removed from Afternic as if they were individually removed?
Theo, I did test it personally this morning before messaging you – domains that I added to Dan, then activated to Afternic distribution, were removed from distribution as soon as I deactivated on Dan. If any readers are not having this experience, please email me on jiles@godaddy.com.