General Domain Information

Dan.com was an innovative domain name sales platform that was acquired by GoDaddy in 2022. Dan innovated and brought the Lease to Own (LTO) offering to the mainstream, and it has been adopted by GoDaddy. In its short time in the industry, Dan’s innovations moved the domain name aftermarket forward by leaps and bounds.

With many of the platform’s features integrated into GoDaddy aftermarket offerings, Dan.com is fully shutting down on June 27, 2025. This was shared on X, along with a link to a Medium.com blog post sharing the platform’s history during its short time in existence:

To every customer, partner and team member: you made Dan․com more than a platform – you made it a movement.

As we close our doors on June 27 2025, we want to say thank you for sharing this journey with us: https://t.co/iMfGJ2aTCL pic.twitter.com/pSjOezdsNH

— Dan.com – a GoDaddy brand (@Undeveloped) June 18, 2025

This morning, I received an email from Atom notifying me the nameservers for one of my domain names was not correctly set up. I remembered to change the nameservers when I added it to Atom, so I was confused by the email. I visited the domain name, and as Atom told me, the domain name resolved to its Afternic listing rather than its correct Atom listing.

A visit to my Namecheap control panel showed me what happened. While I had correctly changed NS1.Afternic / NS2.Afternic to the required Atom nameservers, I inadvertently left the Afternic verification nameserver resolving instead of deleting it. This caused the domain name to occasionally resolve to the previous landing page instead of the new one.

Over the past several years, Hubspot Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has emerged as a prominent figure in the domain name space. Dharmesh has acquired high-value domain names like Chat.com, Prompt.com, and Agent.com for millions of dollars. He later famously sold Chat.com to OpenAI for more than $15 million, including equity in the privately-held company.

In addition to these acquisitions, Dharmesh recently built an AI-driven domain name valuation agent on his Agent.ai platform. It can probably be billed as a work in progress, but it provides users with both a quantitative valuation along with a qualitative aspect as well. It doesn’t hurt that values tend to be on the sunny side of the garden.

To make it easier for users to navigate to the domain valuation agent, Dharmesh shared that he acquired the DomainValue.com domain name:

I’ve been a big fan of lease to own deals for quite some time. Before Dan.com existed, I had several LTO deals, but they required quite a bit of legal review and discussion with the counterparties. Dan.com made the LTO process quicker and easier, although I believe the seller takes on more risk without a customized purchase agreement. Afternic has continued Dan’s efforts, allowing for quick and easy LTO transactions.

I have LTO enabled for most of my inventory quality domain names listed for sale on Afternic. The LTO length varies based on a few important factors that I want to share below.

Andrew Miller has been sharing a regular post on LinkedIn each week called Random Sunday Thoughts. In each Sunday morning edition, Andrew has shared a mix of insights and news. There is a heavy focus on the domain industry and his Hilco Digital Assets business in particular.

Typically, I would see Andrew share a link on X to his LinkedIn post, but I likely missed a few when I wasn’t online Sunday mornings. Recently, Andrew converted Random Sunday Thoughts into a (free) LinkedIn newsletter subscription, making it easier to access the series. It also appears that he shares even more insights within the subscription posts. Andrew shared his third subscription post this morning.

I don’t have many LinkedIn subscriptions, but I just subscribed to Andrew’s RSL series because I appreciate reading his domain industry insights. Now, it’s easier to read them when I can.