Want to pay 25% fees to Afternic? Then do this! (1.Viewing)

GoDaddy’s acquisition of Uniregistry in 2020 was followed by a change in the now defunct platform’s fees.

Raising the fee from 10% to 15% was only the beginning; the eventual acquisition of Dan.com in 2022 was also followed by a raise in fees to 15%. What GoDaddy gave back in exchange, was the lowering of its Afternic and network fees from 20% to 15%.

But that equalization of fees across all GoDaddy marketplaces was accompanied by a sneaky clause, raising its fees to a whopping 25% when a domain was sold but wasn’t using an approved nameserver pair.

This trickery caused some domain investors to get hit with 25% in sales fees just because they had listed, for example, their domains at Afternic but were using their own landing pages to capture traffic, process leads, and send these leads to their Afternic listings. They believed GoDaddy was part of a free market where the consumer has a choice.

Instead, the 25% charges that GoDaddy/Afternic/Dan impose to such transactions is a representation of a market where competition is suppressed and where choices are punished—and yet, GoDaddy had the audacity to justify this fee as the supposed “true value” of Afternic, calling the 15% rate a “discount.”

Click to expand...

MapleDots said:

I predict eventually GoDaddy will have to lower the fees as they start to lose market share.

Click to expand...

Direct link to post on X.com