Afternic

Last year, I won a non-.com auction at Dynadot. The domain name may be considered a typo of another word word, but this “typo” has 100+/- TLDs registered, which is what caught my attention. In fact, at least 15 of those TLDs are developed, so there’s quite a bit of usage around this brandable term.

Shortly after buying the domain name for less than $20, I listed it for sale on Afternic. Somehow, I mistyped the domain name and listed the correctly spelled non -.com domain name. Apparently, when I later searched my Afternic account for the domain name and didn’t see it, I added it a second time – this time with the actual domain name I bought and own.

A month ago, I shared the results of my first month with Afternic “Boost” enabled on my account. Technically, the Boost features were previously enabled for everyone, so it was the first month where people could either pay a higher commission rate on Afternic sales or opt out of the Boost program.

The first month of Boost was fairly strong for my Afternic-listed portfolio. I had 4 BIN sales and 1 LTO sale. I also had a DBS sale on a domain name I had delisted due to the Boost commission increase. I don’t keep track of this, but 5 sales on the platform in a single month was probably one of the best months I’ve had in terms of domain names sold. Because I delisted most of my higher value names above $2k, the revenue total was inconsequential.

When a domain name is listed for sale on Afternic, there are many ways a prospective buyer can become a “Lead.” A lead is a prospective buyer of a domain name who, instead of buying the domain name immediately via BIN options, has engaged with an GoDaddy or Afternic broker.

Sometimes a lead is a person who wants to buy a domain name, and other times, it is someone who is confused and ends up calling GoDaddy or submitting an inquiry form in confusion.

For many years, Afternic and GoDaddy did not share much information about leads. As far as I am aware, one of my domain names could have strong interest from buyers, but if nobody submitted an offer at or above the minimum offer amount, I would not have been notified.

More recently, Afternic introduced the “Lead Center” control panel, which provided  information about leads and the status of negotiations. It also offered a streamlined way for sellers to communicate with brokers.

In the Afternic Lead Center control panel, there is a column for “Status” to keep the domain owner informed of the current status of a negotiation. There are several terms that can be used in this column, including Sold, Qualifying, Confused, Negotiation, Stalled, and Unknown. Over the last year or so, I have come to learn what each status means, but they aren’t totally clear, and I don’t see these terms defined anywhere.

Yesterday in response to a question on X, Afternic shared what each status means (except for Unknown) to give a better understand to customers:

We’re happy to share some information here!

Stalled: this status essentially means that the lead is inactive due to a number of reasons, including declined offers, no engagement, or low budget. In most cases, brokers continue to reach out to these potential buyers over time.…

— Afternic (@afternic) October 17, 2024

I am pretty sure the Unknown status is for leads created prior to the Lead Center. Because Afternic has not been able to make contact with the prospective buyer to understand the status, it is listed as “Unknown.”

If you see another status term and are curious about what it means, feel free to ask in the comment section.

Following the news that GoDaddy is retiring Dan.com, the company launched a migration page to transfer domain name sale listings from Dan.com to Afternic. I did not have a ton of faith that this migration would be seamless, so I opted to proactively delete all of my active listings on Dan.com and not worry that something would go haywire in the migration process.

The deadline to manually migrate domain names from Dan.com to Afternic has passed, and Dan.com emailed customers who hadn’t previously migrated domain names to notify them that listings have been migrated automatically. I received the email this morning, which I shared below.

Since I did not have any domain names listed for sale at Dan.com, there should have been nothing to migrate. I am going to reach out to my Afternic account manager, Alex (who has been very helpful to me), to ensure no changes were made to my account. Hopefully, he has the ability to detect any changes that have been made as a result of this automated migration.

I hand registered 29 domain names at GoDaddy two days ago. I registered them in two swaths – 20 names and 9 names. Afternic is now the default nameservers I have set for my newly registered domain namesat GoDaddy, figuring my infrequent hand registered domain names will be priced under $2k from the get go.

Soon after registering these domain names, I added them to my Afternic account, where they are priced at $999 – $1,999/each. Shortly thereafter, I noticed a new heading in my Afternic account: “Pending Sync.”