Dan.com Being Retired by GoDaddy

GoDaddy acquired Dan.com in 2022. The company reportedly spent north of $71 million USD to acquire the domain name sales platform. This morning, GoDaddy announced it is “merging” the Dan.com platform with Afternic. The announcement was made in a blog post, and the company provided answers to numerous questions domain investors and Dan customers will likely have in the wake of this news.

This news isn’t surprising as the company has hinted at this outcome for a while. It comes after GoDaddy acquired Uniregistry, another competitor it shut down following an acquisition of its assets. Two well-liked platforms have now been acquired and retired.

For the first time in several years, I no longer have any domain names listed for sale via Dan.com. I began moving inventory away from Dan over the Summer and recently accelerated the move. The writing has been on the wall, and I wanted to ensure dormant listings didn’t accidentally synch to Afternic unintentionally.

It’s sad, as I closed a substantial amount of deals on the platform. In fact, I have two active LTO deals via Dan that still have low five figures in payments to collect. I will have to review the Dan FAQs to understand what happens to those payments, but the lease holders should be more interested in that.

Other questions I have that should be answered by GoDaddy are related to older leads and negotiations at Dan – what happens to those? As far as I understand, those older leads will no longer be accessible due to GDPR. How about an archive of previous discussions that may or may not have worked out but could be needed for review in the future? Fortunately, I have an email trail, but it would always be nice to have access to the original discussions.

Today is a sad day because I really enjoyed working with everyone at Dan. I can’t say it comes as a surprise though.