Goodbye, Dan.com

I’ve done quite a bit of business with Dan.com. In fact, I probably have more deal revenue on Dan.com than anywhere else other than private sales. The platform has been easy to use as a seller and as a buyer. The only real knock I’ve ever had with Dan.com is their brand wasn’t well-known, and it may not have had a trust factor when doing large deals or long-term deals. GoDaddy’s acquisition of Dan.com helped rectify that issue, and it’s been relatively smooth sailing since then.

This morning, Afternic made an announcement that has been in the works for a while. The sales platform launched a GoDaddy-branded landing page that is very similar to Dan.com landing pages, without the Dan.com branding.

Introducing Afternic’s new Custom Lander, combining a familiar design with powerful GoDaddy branding!

Featuring:
✅ Lease to Own
✅ CamelCasing
✅ Internationalization

and more, all backed by GoDaddy.

Let’s explore the Custom Lander 👇 https://t.co/mZQb3TbaZg

— Afternic (@afternic) July 17, 2024

The differences between this new Afternic landing page and Dan.com landers include pricing in local currencies, messaging in local languages, the inability to change some colors and layouts, and the seller’s icon is missing. This last one may seem minor, but I’ve probably close 10 deals from people who saw my Embrace.com icon and reached out directly to buy a domain name. The biggest difference though, is the back-end platform that drives the landing pages. That is going to turn into a time suck for me.

I am a big proponent of CamelCasing. I think GetOnYourFeet.com looks much better than getonyourfeet.com. From what I can tell, I am going to have to click through on each of my listings, edit them to camel casing, and then save the listing. Doing this via Dan.com on the main page would be far faster. I don’t really see an easy way around this manual work, so it is going to take time for me to implement across my portfolio.

With the launch of the new landing pages, it looks like I am going to be moving away from Dan.com. Aside from the exceptional customer service I have come to greatly appreciate at Dan.com, I don’t really think there’s a reason to keep my names parked on this Afternic sister platform. In fact, I would imagine there is going to be a day when GoDaddy kills-off Dan.com entirely. That day is probably coming sooner than later.

I’ve really enjoyed the Dan.com platform and the people who made it easier to buy and sell domain names via Dan.com. It appears those days are coming to an end.

Update: As Swetha pointed out in the X post below, it appears there is no “make offer” option with the new landing page right now. That’s a pretty big deal for me on my higher priced names. For the time being, I am going to make the change only on my lowest priced names and wait for the Make Offer option.

Please keep make offer as well. Hope it’s not difficult.

— Swetha.xyz (@DomainNameGear) July 17, 2024

Afternic mentioned Make Offer will come to the landing page in the future. Until then, I will only move my BIN inventory that doesn’t permit offers:

We will be adding Make Offer to the Custom Lander in the future!

— Afternic (@afternic) July 17, 2024