Trying to decide between Afternic and Spaceship? Here's the definitive answer...
The last time we got an annual report from Afternic for our portfolio, 36% of sales came from landers. The rest was DLS, of which 80% was GoDaddy itself and the remainder was external partners. This was before boost existed.
Around a year ago we checked a small sample of 50 network sales from Afternic to see which resellers were producing. 40 came from GoDaddy (80%), 6 from Namecheap (12%), and the other four (8%) came from four smaller registrars. So that tracks with the annual report.
If you don't list on Spaceship at all, you can expect to lose 7.7% of your sales from them pulling out of Afternic and Sedo distribution. For most this is a no-brianer.
But we can also play out various scenarios with the commissions. Let's take $100k in non-boosted sales as an example, since most people aren't using boost. Commissions are 15% if using Afternic NS, 25% if pointed elsewhere, and 5% for Spaceship.
1. Listed on Both but Pointed at Afternic - $92,300 of sales will be Afternic at 15%, which is $13,845 in commission. $7,700 of sales will be Spaceship at 5%, which is $385 in commission. Leaving you with $85,770 after commission.
2. Listed on Both but Pointed at Spaceship - In this case 56.3% of sales will be Afternic at 25%, and 43.7% (36% landers + 7.7% reg path) of sales will be Spaceship at 5%. In that case you have $14,075 commission to Afternic, and $2,185 commission to Spaceship, netting you $83,740 after commission.
So you actually end up $2,030 worse off switching to Spaceship, despite the lower commission. And that's the absolute best case scenario, assuming their landers convert at the same rate as Afternic. Given the name recognition of GoDaddy, that's probably not the case. A few lost lander sales and you might easily be down $10k+ by switching.
Afternic is not dumb. They structured the commissions such that even if a competitor charged 0%, you would STILL end up worse off by using their landers instead of Afternic. Let that sink in.
Nobody will ever cause a mass-migration from Afternic unless they can get the courts to force Afternic to stop the anti-competitive commission structure, or unless the competitor starts having massive distribution.
12% of network sales isn't going to cut it, not by a long shot. Afternic is the only choice for the foreseeable future, sorry to all the GoDaddy haters out there.
