Yesterday, Afternic announced its new “Boost” feature. Afternic sellers are automatically opted into this program and must opt-out if they don’t wish to participate. The features and potential benefit of Afternic Boost were shared in a thread yesterday:
Introducing Boost, our new program that can contribute up to a 10% increase in sales performance for your portfolio* with:
🚀 Higher visibility at GoDaddy
👀 Boost badges to support conversions
📨 Email marketing to potential buyersLaunches September 4! https://t.co/l2t7NnWyzV
— Afternic (@afternic) August 7, 2024
My read on the news is the commission rate is reverting back to 20% for people using their nameservers in exchange for some features and enhancements.
From what I understand, some of those features have already rolled out. For example, the “Premium” and “Verified” badges already appear on domain names in the registration path. This means sellers may already have experienced a “boost” or not from those particular benefits of the Boost program. The idea of an email campaign is interesting, but it is unclear if or how often seller domain names will be included in outbound marketing efforts.
For my business, this Summer has been fairly slow for selling inventory-quality domain names. In addition, I have a small portfolio of about 2,000 domain names, so it is also a challenge to interpret my sales data in a way that can give me real insight into whether or not the current “Boost” features have been helping me.
What I can say with confidence is that the few BIN and LTO sales I’ve had on Afternic in the last couple of months do not move the needle for me one way or the other.
I haven’t made any decision yet on what I am going to do with regards to my Afternic listings. Fortunately, I have a few weeks to decide. Giving an extra 5% to Afternic upon a successful sale isn’t the end of the world, but it is not ideal.
One option I am considering, based solely on my history of sales at Afternic, is keeping my inventory-quality domain names at Afternic that is priced below $5,000 or maybe $2,500. Anything above those amounts may be removed from Afternic and marketed for sale elsewhere. Perhaps I will use Efty or my own landing pages. That is TBD. I can make changes as I go based on my own results and business needs.
If someone uses the GoDaddy registration path to search for one of my domain names, they will still be given the Domain Buy Service option for $119.99. The GoDaddy DBS broker would engage with me and the onus of paying a commission would be on the buyer. I would lose out on searches at Afternic partners though. I also think the DBS fee is a big deterrent to offers, but that’s another story.
I don’t love making important decisions like this without good data. With a slow Summer for inventory-quality sales, it is going to be a bit more challenging to decide how to proceed.
My portfolio and situation is different than almost everyone else, so I am going to give this thought over the next few weeks before I decide what changes to make.
I like Afternic but when I saw the announcement all it said to me was – we are raising commissions by 5%. The boost spin they put on it is just that. I understand – they have to say something other than just we are raising commission by 5%.
“I would lose out on searches at Afternic partners though”
Not necessarily. The Sedo MLS covers pretty much all Afternic partners other than GoDaddy. This is exactly what Huge Domains seems to be doing. They removed all their 4-5 Million listings from Afternic, and are now exclusively using Sedo MLS alongside their own landing pages on Hugedomains.com.
My question is, why not offer the boost for free. More people would move to afternic. I broker domain names and I can tell you, afternic does not reach out to sell. I would venture to guess that any lead would be from and incoming inquiry and I’m sure they have alert signals for keywords that buyers have signed up for. IOWs, they are not working hard to sell domain names. To me it is greed… I am goin got raise my prices 25% so I at least get a fair sale. Lastly, afternic and sedo have never reached out to me with anything since 2000 when I started domaining.
Will they be implementing a make offer option, or will that be an additional five percent?
I was told by Paul Nicks that Make an offer is next to be added to lander pages.🤞
I really miss Bin/Make offer option that I used to use at GoDaddy Auctions.
Billie Jean King got it right…she said the players have all the power, without them there won’t be the tournament.
That why the women tennis and soccer players have one voice
So why are those sleasy afternic charge us when they are the ones needing our domains.
Without our domains they are nothing
They should be paying us,!!
If you don’t see any sales when you opt in what makes you think there will be sales when you opt out?? LMAO
Then it is time to move out
This isn’t new; PPC/traffic has always been like this, remember Yahoo/Google days. GD has a near monopoly on distribution, and its large customer base keeps buyers and sellers hooked. Until enough sellers decide to switch, GD will keep squeezing. It’s just business 101.
The solution? Get off that ship. Go elsewhere. Be independent. Use Efty, create and manage your own landers —anything but relying on these predators.
Take control of your leads. Talk to your customers. Learn marketing. Learn to negotiate.
Yes, it seems hard and unfamiliar, but you can enjoy the journey and start believing in yourself. Others are already doing it, and you can too.
If I’m not mistaken I think the term for this is cost-price squeeze. Sales are down so they can quickly implement this change to alleviate pressure on their profits, but down the line we are very unlikely to raise prices in this environment, so it just hits us.
If everything is boosted, nothing is boosted.
I’m also not decided yet.
I’ll give it a trial run
I’ve had only decent sales via Afternic in the last 4 weeks
Lots of leads and inquiries, but I really believe GD/Afternic needs a better way to qualify and vet leads, as so many “buyers” seem to inquire just for kicks and with no real intention to buy — the brokers at Afternic must feel like the salesmen in the play/film “Glengarry Glen Ross” after a while – dealing with lots of time wasters and deadbeats
One of my domains on Afternic got over 25 inquiries yesterday — all time-wasters — none interested in really buying the domain…LOL… talk about people living “lives of quiet desperation” … is inquiring about a domain name with zero intention of buying it some new weird fetish or something ..LOL
“Yes, I’m interested in er, uh, buying the, uh, uh, domain……”
“Broker: “What? Hello? Hello? Hello?”