When researching domain names to buy, one indicator of value I look at is the number of other extensions that are or have been registered. My thinking is that if others have registered the .net, .org, .info, and other extensions with that same keyword, there are likely some immediate suiters for the .com domain name I am evaluating.

When looking at GoDaddy Auctions, the GoDaddy Appraisal is shown on each landing page. While I don’t give that value more credence than I should, it is undoubtedly one signal I look at when trying to find valuable domain names up for auction.

One observation I have made is that the GoDaddy Appraisal seems to be higher when there is more than one extension registered. Here’s a completely hypothetical example of the differences I think I noticed based on this observation:

Last week, I shared the news about NameFind (GoDaddy) acquiring a domain name portfolio from Yummy Names (Tucows). Although I could only see a handful of domain names transfer, I concluded that it must have been a portfolio acquisition because I have not seen GoDaddy acquire small groups of domain names before. This indicated the company bought a portfolio and GoDaddy’s Paul Nicks confirmed the news. As is typical, Paul declined to tell me how many names the company bought nor did he share the dollar value of the acquisition. Despite this, I still believe this acquisition is newsworthy.

In my opinion, GoDaddy has more domain name sales data than anyone else in the business. GoDaddy manages its own portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domain names, and it also has oversight on sales and offers received by its clients via Afternic and elsewhere within GoDaddy. I would speculate that GoDaddy can see and track offers and sales on several million domain names. This is in addition to GoDaddy Auctions, which is more focused on the wholesale side of the market. A few domain brokers may have as good (or better) of a read on the highest end of the domain name aftermarket, but GoDaddy has more intel on the overall health of the aftermarket than any other company.

This portfolio acquisition is newsworthy to me because it shows me that GoDaddy has

Andrew Allemann reported that GoDaddy has (finally) added its logo to domain name inquiry landing pages on a subset of domain names in its NameFind portfolio. You can look at the screenshot Andrew provided or you can visit Cuisine.com to see how the new landing page looks. To compare to the old landing page – and the one still used by most of its domain names – you can visit Tornado.com.

I believe the thinking is the GoDaddy logo will enhance trust over the Afternic logo since more people are familiar with GoDaddy than Afternic. If trust is established at the outset, people may be more inclined to submit offers. On the other hand, people may not even notice the difference or care that it’s GoDaddy vs. Afternic.

Do you think the new / revised GoDaddy landing page will perform better?