Afternic closing down announcement?

[namedancer]

I think you've about summed it up, adoptable. From the start they should have at least made it free to be a bidder-- maybe require CC# (without charge) only to help deter insincere bidding.
And made it affordable for the smaller sales, which are the bread and butter of the industry. Maybe one or more of the newer, more tightly-run sites will figure out the formula and end up the Ebay of domain names!

[beatz]

The main reason for places like Afternic and GD failing businesswise is very simple:

To the end buyer(and that's where the most money comes vs.speculators amongst themselves) just the idea of bidding on a domain is uncommon and strange.An end buyer, if at all willing to pay for a domain doesn't want to undergo complicated handlings etc; all they want is to buy the name, hear an asking price,decide if they think the price is ok and if so, then simply buy.
I mean, if you're lucky enough and an endbuyer is willing to buy your name, how stupid to make it more complicated than neccessary by implementing an auction system, escrows and such.I bet that through domain auction systems like afternic more domain sales have been prevented than pushed.
Bottom line:
- If you wanna sell a domain to an enduser, make it as easy as possible for him and avoid domain auctions
- As a result of this it means that on places like AN the only buyers/sellers you will find are speculators amongst themselves where the buyers are used to only pay like 20% of enduser value for a domain which again is the reason for AN's low comission.
- In the end AN's biggest mistake was to think their main business would be comissions from END USERS.

[proproject]

I think this is safe to say to clear up (or maybe add to) the confusion. I spoke with the general manager of AN yesterday (9/25) and he told me that Register.com has NOT decided to actually close AN yet.