Where to List: Afternic, Sedo, Atom, and Brokers

Listing is free everywhere, so the question isn't really "which one" — it's which combination, and what each is actually good at.

The venues

Afternic (GoDaddy-owned) has the widest distribution in the industry. Its listings surface in registrar search results across many partner sites, which means your name appears in front of someone checking availability at their own registrar. That reach is the whole value proposition. Note that Dan.com merged into Afternic and closed in October 2024 — a lot of still-published advice hasn't caught up.

Sedo is long-established, strong in Europe, and runs both a marketplace and auctions.

Atom (formerly Squadhelp, rebranded April 2024) is a curated brandable marketplace. Names go through a review process, which means rejection is possible, but it also means the inventory is stronger and buyers arrive expecting to pay for a brand rather than hunting bargains. It's the right venue for invented, brandable names — the ones that outreach can't reach because their buyer is a startup that doesn't exist yet.

Your registrar's marketplace. Whoever you're with likely has one, often with the lowest commission since they're not paying for distribution.

Your own landing page. Free, no commission, and it catches the most motivated buyer of all — the person typing the domain directly.

What commission actually costs

Two of my own 2026 sales, same year, very different economics:

| Domain | Venue | Gross | Commission | Net | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | PeakCovers.com | Afternic | $3,246 | 25% | $2,434.50 | | BankBrewing.com | Spaceship | $1,297 | 10% | $1,167.30 |

Fifteen percentage points. Afternic took $811.50 of that first sale.

The obvious conclusion — always use the cheaper venue — is wrong. Afternic's distribution is why that sale happened. A 25% commission on a sale you'd otherwise never make beats 10% of nothing every time. The right conclusion is narrower: know your net, and don't assume the headline price is what you're getting.

List everywhere, with one caveat

Because listing is free, the default should be listing broadly. The caveat is price consistency: if the same name shows $2,000 on one marketplace and $3,500 on another, a buyer who checks both will anchor to the lower one and trust you less. Keep prices synchronized, and reprice everywhere at once.

When to use a broker

A broker sells on your behalf for a commission, using relationships and outreach you don't have. They're worth it on genuinely valuable names — and they won't take a $1,500 domain, because the commission doesn't justify the work.

I currently have three names with a brokerage: CardFanatics.com, StarviewRealty.com, and MountainCrestHomes.com. That's a deliberate part of a multi-pronged strategy rather than a replacement for the rest.

The analogy that makes it click is real estate: you can sell your own house, and some people do. The large majority of sales still go through a professional, because the professional has the contacts, knows the values, and does this all day.

What a broker brings:

• Relationships with buyers at the level where deals are large
• Valuation experience across thousands of names
• Negotiation by someone with no emotional stake
• Credibility — an approach from a brokerage reads differently than a cold email from an individual

What broker-level sales look like

Worth understanding the shape of the high end, because it's different from portfolio flipping.

The largest sales tend to be selling a company a better version of the domain they already have. A business on young.nl upgrading to young.com. A company on theice.com moving to ice.com — that one sold for $3.5 million, under agreement to closed in 48 hours, because the price was right for both sides.

Which brings up the single most important negotiation insight I've heard on high-value names:

That principle scales all the way down. The plumbing company you email about a $2,000 name will also just delete a $20,000 ask, and you won't get a second opening.

The reality of what brokers see

A working broker gets 100–120 emails a day from people sending lists of domains they want represented, and roughly 99% of those names aren't worth anything. That's a useful calibration in two directions: it tells you how much undifferentiated inventory exists, and it tells you what "good enough for a broker to take" actually means as a quality bar.

A sensible default

For a typical portfolio:

1. Every name points at a for-sale landing page
2. Every name listed on the widest-distribution marketplace you can access
3. Every name also on your registrar's marketplace if commission is lower
4. Brandables submitted to a curated marketplace
5. Your best few names offered to a broker
6. Prices synchronized across all of them, repriced annually

That's an afternoon of setup for a whole portfolio and then it runs by itself. Which is, in the end, how most first sales happen — mine included.