GoDaddy

As part of his coverage of GoDaddy’s pending acquisition of Dan.com, Andrew Allemann published an interview with Paul Nicks, President of Domains, at GoDaddy. The question and answer that caught my attention the most was regarding commission:

Domain Name Wire: Many people use GoDaddy’s Afternic DLS to get in the registrar registration path, but choose Dan.com landers because they’re cheaper (9% vs. up to 20%). Will this still be an option or should we expect to pay higher prices for landing page sales in the future?

Nicks: We are still in the early stages and do not have a plan around commission alignment. Once we have updates to share, we’ll share proactively.

The thing that jumped out at me was Paul’s comment about “commission alignment.”

I list nearly all of my domain names for sale on both Dan.com and GoDaddy (via Afternic). The domain names mostly resolve to Dan.com landing pages but are also listed via GoDaddy’s expansive sales network. These are the only two platforms I currently use to sell domain names, beyond my own landing pages.

In a blog post published on Medium this morning, Dan.com announced it is going to be acquired by GoDaddy:

📣We are thrilled to announce we entered into an agreement with GoDaddy to bring Dan’s innovative products and engine to one of the most respected brands in domains and their 21+ million customers!

Read more here: https://t.co/CwrYVvEBWUhttps://t.co/bPjdt7obIZ

— Dan.com (@Undeveloped) June 28, 2022

I’ve always had several accounts at GoDaddy dating to when I operated two separate companies. When I shut down one company, I was left with two accounts at GoDaddy. One account held a handful of my higher value domain names and the other had all of my other domain names.

With 2 factor authentication enabled on my accounts in addition to the DTVS added level of security, I did not really have much reason or motivation to merge these two accounts. The domain names all renewed with the credit card on file for each account, and I only actively used one of the accounts for buying domain names. The only issue I had was when I wanted to check on something related to a domain name in one account and logged in to the wrong account.

“know. your. worth.” That is wise advice from a domain name registrant who was able to turn a $500 offer via GoDaddy’s Domain Broker Service into a $435,000 domain name sale. The story of how the seller was able to do this, including emails from GoDaddy, was shared in an excellent Twitter thread domain investors will want to read:

how i bought a crypto domain for $16,
told a multi-billion dollar CEX to kick rocks,

and negotiated my way from a $500 offer to selling it for half a million dollars:

🧵 pic.twitter.com/5LauO0vbiU

— cryptofelon (@cryptofelon) April 28, 2022