Fresh Afternic integrations could lead to more stale listings

More sales are good but recent integrations might cause headaches.

GoDaddy made a couple of recent changes that could push more inventory to its distributed Afternic network. More inventory is good, but I worry that the fresh inventory will include a higher-than-normal rate of invalid listings.

First, GoDaddy created a tool to move marketplace domains from Uni, which is shutting down, to Afternic. This can be helpful if you regularly list domains at Uni and not at Afternic.

Second, the firm automatically syndicated domains listed on Dan that have a buy now price to the Afternic network.

The challenge I see with these integrations is that Uni and Dan likely have many stale listings. Unlike Afternic, Uni and Dan are not marketplaces. They are landing page services in which people visit a domain and then have the option to buy it. (Technically, people could search Uni and Dan inventory, but I doubt many people ever did that.)

Since domains not parked with Uni and Dan would never sell, most domainers didn’t bother to delete domains from these platforms if they no longer wished to sell them there. Perhaps they sold the domain at Sedo and never removed the Dan listing. Or the domains they had on Uniregistry Market expired, and they didn’t bother to delete them.

The Uni migration was opt-in, but there was no going back once you clicked the migration button. I clicked the button thinking I’d get some sort of confirmation regarding what would happen but didn’t. It was too late.

The Dan migration is opt-out, meaning that if your domains are at Dan with buy now prices, they will be syndicated to Afternic unless you opt out.

This past week, I spent a few hours finding and removing over 100 invalid listings from my Afternic account. Most of these were added through the Uni migration. I opted out of Dan syndication since I by now list all of those domains on Afternic.

So while I think it’s great that domains are getting more views through Afternic, I worry there will be more invalid listings. This creates a bad experience for buyers. It is also annoying when domain investors try to list their newly-purchased domains on Afternic, only to find they are by now listed by someone else who no longer owns them.