Dan.com acquired by Godaddy (1.Viewing)

Ohh man, there goes the end of 9% commission

There is no way in the world Godaddy will continue that!!



Good thing the NEW DN.ca marketplace is coming for Canadians with 0% commission!

This is horrible news and yes, you can say goodbye to the 9% commission and possibly to Dan itself, as I could see GD buying the company just to "amalgamate it with Afternic" as that route is pretty clear from the interview I read with Paul Nicks. It's all "Afternic, Afternic, Afternic" and virtually nothing about Dan.

How I see it progressing:

1) A change to 20% commission in the coming months due to "alignment with the current GD fee structure".
2) A slow merge with Afternic, with the distinct possibility of adding Dan features and automation to the Afternic network and potentially shutting Dan down (i.e. "merging the two entities into a dynamic new aftermarket engine").

Monopoly control is always bad news and it looks like GD is going to flash their wallet at all the domain aftermarket competitors and see who's greedy enough to take the bait.

Apparently the Dan owners were looking to get paid, after shoveling us all that happy horseshit about "becoming a registrar" and "system improvements" they just took the money and ran, leaving their customer base locked in with GoDaddy. Very disappointing, as I thought they actually liked being in business, and were better than that.

You don't have to look further than the full decimation of Uni Registry to see how this will end up.

Forced move over to Godaddy

For me it's too early to tell, but I suspect things will probably degrade a bit because GD moves slow and has no pressure to speed things up at all. But I'm hoping we can somehow get the best of both worlds.

Would be nice if GD could introduce a new commission structure (even though it doesn't look like it now) where if a buyer comes directly to our BIN lander then we pay a lower commission because GD/Afternic isn't involved at all.

But at the end of the day, this is a great move by Reza and the other Dan owners. The goal of pretty much any startup is to exit with a great payday

Spex said:

But at the end of the day, this is a great move by Reza and the other Dan owners. The goal of pretty much any startup is to exit with a great payday

Click to expand...

And that's the big problem with today's society. The only reason people want to build anything is to sell it off as quickly as possible to a bigger fish, thus screwing their customer base and ensuring a closer-to-monopoly business environment.

Naturally, this also lowers customer trust in new startups (like deciding whether to get invested in a Netflicks series Season 1 ) thus giving the advantage to the established near-monopolies/oligopolies and making it even tougher on new businesses. It's a vicious cycle that ends in monopoly control.

It wasn't always this way, and not that long ago, many entrepreneurs actually wanted to own and operate a business over the long term.

Now we're living in a "Take The Money and Run" environment.

I get what you're saying, but when a big player shows up with a bag of cash, it's hard to say no

I don't know any of the people involved, but maybe they'll use this money to start a passion project or a charity, or spend more time time with their family, etc..