GoDaddy

When Accelerator.com went to expiry auction at GoDaddy Auctions, the Whois registrant was (and still is as of publication) listed as “Afternic, LLC – On Behalf of Domain Owner“. If you look up just about any GoDaddy-registered domain name currently in auction at GoDaddy Auctions, it likely has the “Afternic, LLC – On Behalf of Domain Owner” registrant information. At any given time, there are thousands of domain names with this registrant information.

I have been asked many times who this actually is, and I have come to understand that this is essentially a holding account for domain names that are pending completion of a sale. A GoDaddy-registered domain name that expired and is no longer able to be renewed will be moved to this account once it is past the renewal time and before the auction transaction is completed.

When someone previously asked about this registrant, GoDaddy’s Joe Styler answered on NamePros:

I learned there was a round of layoffs this week involving GoDaddy’s Domains, Registrars, and Investors (DRI) Group. This is the team that interacts with domain investors and partner domain registrars. I do not know the scope of the layoff, nor do I know if employees who work directly with domain investors were impacted by this layoff.

I reached out to GoDaddy to seek information about the layoff. The company seemingly confirmed that jobs were lost but did not share much additional information. I was given the following statement by a company representative:

Last week, Dan.com announced and deployed a feature I did not like. On the user control panel, Dan showed GoDaddy’s Estimated Value for each domain name listed for sale on the platform. The Estimated Value utilizes GoDaddy’s GoValue automated appraisal. Upon deployment, there was no way to hide the column like you could hide other columns.

The idea behind this deployment was to make it easier and faster for users to price their domain names since domain names listed with a BIN price tend to sell faster than those without pricing.

As I noted last week, Dan.com appears to have changed when it pays out sellers for monthly payments on LTO deals. I did not understand what was changing when it was mentioned in bullet 9 of a July 13th product product update, but I did notice it when one of my monthly LTO payouts was pushed back a week. The timing was different than a same day payout on July 19th and a next day payout on July 26th for two other LTO deals I have.

Following a tweet about this change, someone shared a couple of screenshots that appeared to me to show that even if a buyer pays off a LTO purchase early, Dan.com would pay-out the seller on the original payment schedule as if the buyer hasn’t paid early. To me, this would be unfair since Dan would have the full payment and the buyer would have the domain name, but the seller would not be paid early.

On July 13th, Afternic announced it would begin allowing sellers to implement a Lease to Own (LTO) offer for domain names. This meant buyers shopping for domain names on GoDaddy or GoDaddy’s network would be able to purchase a domain name using monthly installments. This was an expected update following GoDaddy’s acquisition of Dan.com, a platform that pioneered the automated domain name LTO sales.

In conjunction with the Afternic news shared on the 13th, Dan.com also shared some platform and product updates. Update #9 is one I completely overlooked but could have some negative consequences to some sellers who rely on monthly LTO payments to fund business activities. This update covers payments, and apparently, payout timing.