New role will be exclusively focused on domain name investors.
Paul Nicks has moved to a new role at GoDaddy as the company shifts some management aspects of its domain name business.
Nicks previously served as President, Domain Registrars and Investors. His new role is VP, Domain Investor.
The move comes as GoDaddy is working to move some aspects of its domain name business closer to the end user. As more customers register domains as part of using GoDaddy’s website builder and Airo, parts of the domain registration business will move to that segment of managerial control.
Nicks will be in charge of the aftermarket, Domain Academy, Domain Discount Club, and anything involving domain name investors.
Some aspects of the aftermarket, such as how premium domains are merchandised, will move to the teams that manage those experiences.
“The vast majority of our aftermarket sales go to independent customers, small and medium businesses, so that’s really the target market,” Nicks said. “Getting domain sales, including the aftermarket, closer to the team selling those things packaged with websites will improve sell-through rates, etc., for the domain investor.”
For the domain name investment community, this means Nicks will be exclusively focused on its needs, rather than also overseeing the domain name registrar business as a whole.
Nicks will discuss these changes and more in an upcoming Domain Name Wire podcast. Feel free to comment below if you have questions you’d like me to ask Nicks for the podcast.
Promoted then demoted?? At least he still has a job!
Took a gamble and tried something new, then we found an even better solution. Not everything is as black and white as promote/demote.
Sure bro lol
I took a gamble and tried something new as well and moved all my names to Namecheap from Godaddy because you guys are ripping off and scamming people
Good luck Paul, but GoDaddy is too far gone IMO. The CEO and Shareholders don’t give a crap about domain investors.
All the people you laid off last year didn’t get the opportunity to say “tried something new, sorry I failed”. Pretty black and white for them…
I’m hopeful this will be good for domain investors. Having Paul stretched across the registrar business meant he had less time to look at the aftermarket. That said, I have some concerns over how premium domains will be presented in the registration path with Paul not having the final say. We’ll dive into that a bit on the podcast.
GoDaddy’s own portfolio of domains will always take priority over domain investors domains in the registration path.
Paul did a lot of talking and not doing
He should look into removing the GoDaddy appraisal tool. Same should be said of the discount club. Used to register a ton of domains through GoDaddy but I have since defaulted to namecheap; which I don’t like very much except for their rational pricing for domain name investors
Other than convenience of having the domain on afternic/godaddy to manage everything on a single platform the monetary end is completely uncompetitive. Pricing for domain investors and the joke called discount club borders on absurd. Then there is the issue of fast transfer which is one of the reasons many investors keep their domain there. Fast transfer but slow payment seems to be the name of the game. Then also the inherent danger of fast transfer for super valuable domains and you have a crapshow waiting to happen.
GoDaddy will continue to bleed investors as a registrar unless Paul can do something to turn things around.
Maybe Paul could start by leveraging GoDaddy’s scale to buy bulk memberships from DotDB, NameBio, DomainIQ, etc. and package them with the Domain Discount Club.
Originally the Discount Club was just a pure cash grab, charging people for the privilege of getting similar pricing to other registrars. Then they bought Domain Academy to try and add some actual value to the club, which is great, but not nearly enough… especially since they used that as a justification to double the price.
Maybe now they’ll have the requisite focus to start spending those $10m+ per year in club dues on value adds that most investors would actually want and benefit from.
Next he could have Afternic build a settings page where we can add TXT records, so we can verify our domains at other marketplaces while they’re pointed at Afternic NS. Maybe Sedo and Atom and others would follow their lead, and then getting listed and verified on multiple marketplaces wouldn’t be the gigantic headache it is now.
Maybe he could also focus on the domain on-boarding process at Afternic in general. Right now the official steps are as follows:
1. Add domain and price it. Nope, someone else already listed it.
2. Go set verification NS at registrar.
3. Click to verify. Nope, we can’t, this might take up to 24 hours.
– several hours later –
4. Alright fine, we’ll add it. But now it’ll be perpetually stuck In Review.
5. Call Afternic or email rep to try and get it out of purgatory.
6. They clear it out of In Review without even bothering to review anything.
– several months later –
7. The person who incorrectly had it listed before emails their rep to bulk delete listings of domains they dropped/sold. Your domain is in their list, and their rep deletes YOUR listing without double checking anything.
– several months later –
8. You realize your domain isn’t for sale, go add it again and price it.
9. Gets stuck in pending review again, and need to clear it out.
Now you’re actually set long-term. It’s a farce.
Then you have the DAN and Afternic “integration”. If you list a domain at Afternic and select the DAN lander so you have LTO options, they won’t just show the Afternic listing skinned like DAN. They’ll actually load it from DAN, where another seller likely has your domain listed for sale at a different price. You would think they could just pull the data from Afternic, or use that setting as an opportunity to delete the false listing, but nope.
Let Spaceship in the Afternic fast transfer network before you piss off Namecheap and they leave all together, and your network sales drop significantly.
The list goes on and on…
I look forward to seeing what Paul can accomplish with focus mode activated, and I’d be curious to know what his top five priorities are.
Great input!
Wonder if they are going to pay you for all the valuable input …..
I have to ask myself, …. why didn’t they figure all this out in the first place?
Congrats Paul. The aftermarket is one of Godaddy’s most exciting and profitable businesses.
Well, I gave GoDaddy the flick years ago as they’re a plain rip-off. So my real question is, does this mean Paul will have control over Afternic? From a domain investor perspective, sorting out the listing/delisting process there would have to be a priority. I get so sick of receiving emails requesting approval for Fast Transfer authorisation when I haven’t listed the domain (the previous owner just hasn’t bothered to delist it), and there is no easy way for me to delist and get the listing under my own name.
I think Paul is a decent guy – I hope he makes some improvements, before I change my mind…
The yearly renewal fee increases has led to a steady outflow of business from GoDaddy to other registrars.
As long as GoDaddy continues to increase their renewals higher than any other registrar, they will lose big business.
I still value GoDaddy as the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages, albeit the balance is getting close. Their playbook is that of a large public corporation, and fairly predictable in that regard; eventually another player will outmaneuver them, or get rich trying as they are acquired. With that said, as much as we might hope otherwise, one man that is not the CEO is only going to have so much influence on the practices of the behemoth given the responsibility to investors. In my interactions with Paul at events like the ICA meetings, I’ve never had any reason to believe that he didn’t have the best interests of the domain investor community at heart; it was also evident that there were limits on what he could say and possibly do. That’s likely to remain true in his new role, as it is for all corporate employees, and I wish him well for his and our sakes.
Not sure why I got logged in with this username, but this is Fred Kauber.
Just moved our last domain registration away from godaddy. From personal experience and having spent 30+ years in webdev/admin/business, I’m just personally fed up with how difficult GD makes it to get anything done, comparatively, and in my opinion. As an illustration, just spent an hour and a half trying to transfer the last domain registration to another registrar. Error messages from GD were ridiculous. Not intuitive, far too many steps, lacking instruction set, and ended up out of futility, calling their support line. It went off-shore, to two people who I couldn’t understand, who didn’t listen, one of whom hung up on me. Both people gave incomplete instructions which created errors due to omission. This whole process should have taken ten minutes, tops. Never going to get that billable time back. Moved twenty-some domains to a newer, growing registrar (porkbun.com) with much satisfaction and relief. So far, so good. They are small, they are growing, don’t have all the services that the major registrars have, but then, I don’t need many of those services; and even if I did, due to the frustration I’ve had with other large registrars, I wouldn’t go back to them, including GD.