NamesCon Keynote from GoDaddy’s Paul Nicks

Thanks Elliot

Thanks Paul for the great presentation.

I was wanting to know if it is possible to get access to your actual slide presentation maybe on Slideshare?

That would be a great help to go along with the video.

Thanks very much.

Ed

Thanks Ed, let me check internally. I don’t know whether I can share the slides or not

Thanks for the great talk. I enjoyed it so much that I’ve watched it twice already! A few questions:

1. Will the bulk domain appraisal tool be made available more broadly to everyone later? I am very interested in giving it a try to see if it could give me some pointers to where I might want to change the pricing of my domains, but unfortunately I was not able to make it to NamesCon. Maybe you could make this a paid service available to everyone later one?

2. How do we set up the new landing page contact form referred to in the video? Has Afternic launched a new landing page? Or are you referring to http://www.afternic.com/forsale/DOMAIN.COM? Would be great if you consider launching some new/optimized landing pages. On the type-in front, Afternic’s landing pages are rather dated/clunky, especially when compared with those provided by Undeveloped, Efty, Uniregistry, Bodis etc. I believe you can do much better in this area. Hope to see you launch some new landing pages this year, considering all the good landing page work that is being done by your competitors. Most domain investors I know are not sending type-in leads to Afternic anymore. You are losing out on lots of valubale web leads as a result.

I would also recommend creating a new nameserver set for pure sale landing pages. ns1.afternic.com ns2.afternic.com sets up a parking page with ads with a small banner on top. Currently most domain investors seem to prefer to send type-in traffic directly to pure sales landing pages that either prominently display buy it now price and/or contact/offer form. These kinds of landing pages perform much better than pages with ads and a small banner on top.

3. Afternic’s network is performing superbly, but the Afternic website is slow and difficult to use. Will the platform ever see any UI updates to bring the dated system up to present?

4. Quite a few network partners were added last year which had a positive impact on sales. What are your expansion plans in this area in 2018?

Hi Keno, great questions!

1) We don’t currently have plans to extend the bulk appraisal window beyond the end of the month, but please email me at paul@godaddy and I’ll get you a code to play with it.

2) There are a couple of ways to use our lead form; A) you can list your domains on Afternic directly from GoDaddy’s new Advanced List View Beta management interface (look for the “beta” link in top-right corner of current Domain Manager. B) you can set your nameservers to NS3.Afternic.com and NS4.Afternic.com and we’ll route your domains to the new page.

Work is always needed on landing pages to keep them fresh,and we are looking into new templates that are more pure sales tools rather than the traditional parked templates.

3) We are working on backend improvements this year, but I would not expect any UI changes. Ideally we want users to have the ability to list and manage their Afternic listings from their GoDaddy, or other registrar, accounts directly. Forcing a seller away from their preferred registrar’s management interface does not feel like the best user experience overall, so we’re investing in more work like the linking of Afternic to Advanced List View rather than the Afternic.com site itself.

4) We’re going to keep trying to add partners. We’ve added lots of great partners in China and other emerging markets, so we’ll continue to try and convince global registrars about the importance of the Aftermarket and how full access to the largest market in the world is a benefit to their customers.