GoDaddy Adjusts Afternic Fee Policy: Fees for Sales Involving Non-Web Domains Increased to 25 Percent

Recently, with GoDaddy's restructuring following its acquisitions of Uniregistry and Dan.com, the company made significant changes to the fee policy of its domain trading platform, Afternic. Under the new policy, if a domain name is sold on Afternic without using approved name servers, the sales fee will be as high as 25%, which has sparked a lot of concern and discussion in the industry.

Initially, GoDaddy increased Afternic sales commissions from 10 percent to 15 percent and kept the rate at 15 percent after acquiring Dan.com. The company said that these adjustments were aimed at standardizing and optimizing the fees for its various services in order to enhance service quality and market competitiveness.

However, some domain name investors have expressed concerns and dissatisfaction over this high 25% sales fee. They believe that this policy may limit their ability to compete freely on the Afternic platform, especially for those investors who are used to using their own landing pages to direct traffic and handle potential customers.

For domain investors using GoDaddy's standard DNS servers, they have the option of tweaking their A records to make their domains point to their own landing pages and trade on Afternic at a 15% rate. However, these options are limited to the use of approved nameservers such as afternic.com, smartname.com, Dan.com, undeveloped.com and cashparking.com.

For participants in the domain name market, this realignment highlights the challenge of balancing supply and demand with the cost of service amidst emerging technologies and market dynamics. All parties would like to see more transparent and fair fee policies to promote the health of the domain name market and increased investor trust.