Just Parking at Afternic? Here’s What To Do

GoDaddy recently announced the Uni to Afternic migration in March. I was not super happy about this, but I connected with Afternic to get some assistance with setting up the 25 +/- domain names I parked at Uni that earn PPC revenues. Some of these domain names aren’t really for sale (primarily due to the commission structure), but I preferred to try out GoDaddy’s parking option before seeking another solution.

On April 18, as directed, I set the nameservers to ns1.afternic.com ns2.afternic.com, and the domain names with traffic started showing up under the Parking tab in my Afternic account.

Several days ago, I noticed one name in particular wasn’t showing additional traffic or revenue. This was peculiar, and I thought there was some lag in reporting. I emailed GoDaddy over the weekend to see what is up with the reporting.

Before receiving a response this morning, I figured out what was causing the issue. The PPC parking page had disappeared. In its place was the landing page that said the domain name may be for sale. It’s pretty much the default landing page for when a domain name has Afternic nameservers but isn’t listed for sale in an account.

I followed-up this morning to report what I found, and a representative from Afternic told me what I need to do to resolve. I asked if the person could give an update I could share with others who may be facing the same issue as me, and here’s what I was provided:

“If a customer is looking to park their domain names, but not list or sell them through Afternic, they will need to use ns1/2.smartname.com. Afternic Nameservers are only used for domain names that are listed for sale through Afternic. So, if you are using Afternic Nameservers, the domains would need to be actively listed for sale to leverage the lander selection interface.”

Of course, you should reach out directly to your GoDaddy or Afternic account rep if you have specific questions related to your domain names or your account.

Once I changed the nameservers, the domain names began showing a PPC page again. I will keep an eye on my parking stats to make sure the revenue and traffic is updated.

I was disappointed to see the Uni platform sunsetted. It’s not unexpected, but it is always a bit worrisome when changes to something that has been working fine need to be made. The fact that Afternic wasn’t fully prepared is frustrating. The April 18th migration date seemed arbitrary to me, and I don’t think the company should have had customers migrate their accounts until everything was fully tested and ready to go.

I can’t be the only one who parked domain names at Uni and moved them to Afternic without listing them for sale. It doesn’t seem like such an edge case to me.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

10 COMMENTS

  1. Yep – Elliot
    ns1.smartname.com and ns2.smartname.com is all it took. TX
    I could not get a strsight answer out of AfterNIC/GoDaddy all last Week.

  2. If with dan.con only what is the point of using afternic. Any advantage here. If one say has 200 names with uni why not just go with dan vs afternic. Pros and cons..

  3. Uni platform was powerful, and very well built to avoid conflict, and udrp cases. Godaddy is now hurting dan, they haven’t been able to process btc transactions anymore either, they are killing everything slowly.

  4. I would rather they kill Godaddy platform and move everyone over to uni, with their app, uni has secret payment plan system already built in also. Godaddy wants all your data, and leads.

  5. In terms of an aftermarket venue, if you’re choosing Dan, you do have access to Afternic’s distribution network, providing wider marketing for your domains. At this point, for many, comes down to personal preference between Dan and Afternic for selling and managing aftermarket names.

  6. Per comments from “Austinandrew” the PPC revenue on pages using the smartname nameservers is at best 50 cents on the dollar vs. UNI. That said – what other platforms outside of the godaddy monoply perform the best these days.

  7. I have parked domains with uniregistry for many years and the average revenue was around $400. But after uni migration to afternic the revenue dropped to low $XX.

    Many domains are not showing any stats. I have contacted the support and i was asked to change name servers and then later they found the domains were not properly added to the parking program at migration. They again added the domains. But after few weeks also no improvement and even worse. Lot of similar complaints by members of similar domain forums also. But the afternic team is not really in to the actual issue and simply replying to change name servers from afternic to smartname or to smartname to afternic and exercise like re-adding the domains .

    Kindly look in to this or resume uniregistry platform atleast for domain parking.

    Why should afternic buy uniregistry and loose the premium parking?

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