Understanding Afternic’s LTO commission structure

How the commission discounts work.

Yesterday, Afternic disclosed it’s launching lease-to-own (LTO) deals. The firm will charge buyers a service fee for longer-term deals and will share some of this fee with sellers in the form of reduced commissions.

There has been a bit of confusion regarding this, partly since Afternic has a two-tier commission structure: 15% if the domain is parked on an approved server and 25% if it’s not.

So officially, here’s what Afternic is charging buyers:

buyer service fee for lease to own deals at afternic: 0% on 2-23 months, 10% on 13-24, 20% on 25-36, and 30% on 37-60

And here’s how discounts are passed down to sellers:

Seller commission discounts on afternic lease to own: 0% for 12 months or under, 5% on 13-24 months, 10% on 25-36 months, and 15% on 37-60 months.

So if you park your domain on an approved nameserver and the buyer selects a term greater than 36 months, the effective commission of your list price will be 0%.

If the domain is parked elsewhere, it will be 10%.

This is very similar to how Dan.com has run LTO since the beginning. It charged the same markup and then split the markup with sellers.

For example, yesterday Kellie Peterson sold mega .xyz through Dan.com LTO for a list price of $129,000. It was parked at Dan. The buyer opted to pay over 60 months, so the total was $167,700 with the 30% service fee.

This means Kellie will effectively pay 0% commission on her ask price of $129,000, divided across 60 payments for as long as the buyer keeps paying (fingers crossed!).

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