Afternic.WTF

GoDaddy’s Afternic platform introduced a self-brokerage option yesterday, seeking to engage domain investors that would like to handle inbound inquiries themselves.

The system requires that sellers are members of the Discount Domain Club (DDC)—a paid membership that typically costs $240 dollars per year. It does provide added benefits but for the sole purpose of self-brokering your Afternic-listed domains it’s clearly overkill.

Without that DDC package one cannot test the waters, however. GoDaddy is making it impossible to use a new feature without paying extra and that’s plain ridiculous, considering how buggy fresh feature launches have been.

Madness doesn’t end here.

As part of using the self-brokerage feature, communications between a buyer and a seller require the creation of a GoDaddy account by the former.

Instead of providing a contact form with required fields such as name, email, and phone number, the full creation of a GoDaddy platform account is necessary. You can kiss most privacy-minded European buyers goodbye with this requirement.

It’s hard to believe that after paying $71.4 million dollars to acquire Dan.com, GoDaddy is turning Afternic into a dystopian fork on the road for domain investors.

Dan.com allowed self-brokering with low fees, until its acquisition by GoDaddy. The first step was to kill self-brokerage 3 years ago, forcing communications to go via brokers instead. Eventually, GoDaddy forced transitions out of Dan.com to Afternic and it has been attempting to roll back features that existed at Dan.com.

“Afternic, WTF!” would be an appropriate expletive at this combined display of inefficiency and hubris.

Over the years, GoDaddy has received tons of detailed, well-intended feedback from domain investors, only to act towards the opposite direction. Instead of fixing issues and improving the process, GoDaddy has turned Afternic into a bloated process for sellers. Buyers seem to get a better deal but your mileage might vary.

It should not be a “feature request” for Afternic to include a seller’s corporate name on sales invoices; Dan.com had that feature already. What exactly has GoDaddy learned from the gargantuan check it wrote to acquire Dan.com after all?

Keeping the standard fee for self-brokered inquiries is ridiculous; asking sellers to pay for the DDC membership qualifies as a big slap in the face and should be a hard pass by the majority of domain investors.

Copyright © 2025 DomainGang.com · All Rights Reserved.