Afternic Boost – TBD for Me

Yesterday, Afternic announced its new “Boost” feature. Afternic sellers are automatically opted into this program and must opt-out if they don’t wish to participate. The features and potential benefit of Afternic Boost were shared in a thread yesterday:

Introducing Boost, our new program that can contribute up to a 10% increase in sales performance for your portfolio* with:

🚀 Higher visibility at GoDaddy
👀 Boost badges to support conversions
📨 Email marketing to potential buyers

Launches September 4! https://t.co/l2t7NnWyzV

— Afternic (@afternic) August 7, 2024

My read on the news is the commission rate is reverting back to 20% for people using their nameservers in exchange for some features and enhancements.

From what I understand, some of those features have already rolled out. For example, the “Premium” and “Verified” badges already appear on domain names in the registration path. This means sellers may already have experienced a “boost” or not from those particular benefits of the Boost program. The idea of an email campaign is interesting, but it is unclear if or how often seller domain names will be included in outbound marketing efforts.

For my business, this Summer has been fairly slow for selling inventory-quality domain names. In addition, I have a small portfolio of about 2,000 domain names, so it is also a challenge to interpret my sales data in a way that can give me real insight into whether or not the current “Boost” features have been helping me.

What I can say with confidence is that the few BIN and LTO sales I’ve had on Afternic in the last couple of months do not move the needle for me one way or the other.

I haven’t made any decision yet on what I am going to do with regards to my Afternic listings. Fortunately, I have a few weeks to decide. Giving an extra 5% to Afternic upon a successful sale isn’t the end of the world, but it is not ideal.

One option I am considering, based solely on my history of sales at Afternic, is keeping my inventory-quality domain names at Afternic that is priced below $5,000 or maybe $2,500. Anything above those amounts may be removed from Afternic and marketed for sale elsewhere. Perhaps I will use Efty or my own landing pages. That is TBD. I can make changes as I go based on my own results and business needs.

If someone uses the GoDaddy registration path to search for one of my domain names, they will still be given the Domain Buy Service option for $119.99. The GoDaddy DBS broker would engage with me and the onus of paying a commission would be on the buyer. I would lose out on searches at Afternic partners though. I also think the DBS fee is a big deterrent to offers, but that’s another story.

I don’t love making important decisions like this without good data. With a slow Summer for inventory-quality sales, it is going to be a bit more challenging to decide how to proceed.

My portfolio and situation is different than almost everyone else, so I am going to give this thought over the next few weeks before I decide what changes to make.