The time finally came. Dan.com has been completely shuttered by GoDaddy.
The innovative platform was acquired by GoDaddy in 2022. It was operated independently for a short period of time, and the platform was absorbed by GoDaddy and Afternic. Earlier this year, it was announced that Dan.com would close down over the Summer, and that time has come.
If you visit Dan.com now, you will be forwarded to Afternic with a Dan.com tracking url.
My educational background is in the field of direct marketing. Following my undergraduate degree, I went to NYU and earned a Master’s degree in Direct and Interactive Marketing. I then worked at a direct marketing agency called Wunderman, followed by a corporate direct marketing role at AIG.
One of the hallmarks of direct marketing is testing. I recall one of my professors telling the class about the “test everything” mantra in this field. Testing is the most important thing, and once you have a winning campaign or strategy, you keep testing to see if you can iterate and improve your results. All of this is to say that I am a big believer in testing.
I read a blog post about testing written by GoDaddy’s Adam Ramsdell. While I agree with the testing sentiment, I think it would be very difficult for most domain investors – myself included – to accurately test in a way that will create actionable results.
I am a customer of Atom.com and Afternic. My feeling is that Atom does a good job of helping people discover branding opportunities with listed domain names, and Afternic does a good job of helping domain name buyers purchase the domain names they are looking to buy.
At the moment, I have just shy of 250 domain names listed via Atom and I have more than 2,000 listed for sale on Afternic. All of my Atom-listed domain names are also listed for sale on Afternic, but there are rules I am required to follow in order to do so. Since I always list my domain names on Atom with “coins,” the primary rule that I am required to follow is a 10% markup on the BIN price at Afternic.
Michael Sumner from NameBio mentioned an unexpected uptick in sales closed via Sedo over the past couple of weeks, and he asked about whether a major registrar began prioritizing Sedo listings:
We've mirrored our Afternic listings to @Sedo for a few years without using their landers.
In the first five months of 2025 we only had two sales through Sedo, but in the past 12 days we've had four.
Did some major registrar(s) start prioritizing Sedo's MLS over Afternic's DLS,…
— NameBio (@NameBio) July 5, 2025
In response to the question, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall confirmed that happened. Namecheap is now prioritizing Sedo listings when a domain name is listed on Sedo and Afternic:
My Afternic Lead Center is full of Stalled, Qualifying, Confused, and Unknown leads. As a domain investor, this is pretty confusing and slightly frustrating. I don’t blame Afternic brokers for this because I have become familiar with how their platform works, but I do think Afternic and GoDaddy should better educate its sellers on the brokerage process.
When a prospective buyer submits an offer or inquiry, I am pretty certain they quickly receive an automated email with information about the domain name and a broker contact. The Afternic broker will follow up various times via email and a phone call if they have the correct phone number. Afternic brokers earn a living on commissions, so they have a vested interest in selling domain names.
I enabled Afternic’s self-brokerage option as soon as I heard it went live. I immediately tested it out with one of my own domain names so I could see how the platform works as a buyer and as a seller. Before I got started, I ran into an issue, and I couldn’t tell if it was a feature or a bug. James Iles confirmed to me that it this difference is intentional.
When sellers have the self-brokerage option disabled, prospective buyers will be shown a form to submit an offer. On the form, they need to provide their name, email address, and phone number. There are also a few pop-up questions that appear after submitting the form. When sellers have self-brokerage enabled, prospective buyers who wish to submit an offer will need to sign-in to a GoDaddy account to proceed or create a new GoDaddy account. You can have a look at the difference here:
