Afternic, Dan, and the Uni Market have announced a 25% "market alignment fee" for domains that use alternate DNS servers effective February 1st.



If you use your own landing page to capture traffic and your domain sells on any of these GoDaddy subsidiaries, they will charge you a quarter of their profit. It's unbelievable that GoDaddy, a company that earns millions from selling domain names and benefits from the activity of domain investors, is keeping 25% of its earnings.

This is a new low for GoDaddy, as one active domain investor found out when their recently expired domain sold at Afternic. The investor incurred a 25% fee because the domain was pointed to a registry after expiration, even though they weren't using a different sales lander.

This serves as a warning to others to renew good domain names on time before expiry without waiting. The DNS change at expiration triggered an automatic claim to the 25% fee by GoDaddy's "market alignment."