What the public record says.

The largest registrar's annual report describes an aftermarket platform that "processes aftermarket, or secondary, domain name sales" while it "maintain[s] a portfolio of more than 1.0 million domain names," and provides "functionality for the entire registrar network to list expiring domains." Aftermarket revenue is recorded on a gross basis because the company "take[s] control of the domain" — it sells as principal, not only as agent — and it lists among its risks "increases in rates of failed sales… in which we act as the primary obligor, resulting in higher than expected domain portfolio assets."

Aftermarket revenue grew 5.0% in 2024 "due to increasing sales volume," then accelerated through 2025: $128M in Q1 (+5%, average transaction $321 vs $261 a year earlier), $119M in Q2, $136M in Q3 (+28%) as "large transactions returned."

Effective February 1, 2023, the four marketplaces under one roof (Auctions, Afternic, Uniregistry, Dan) moved to 15% commission when the name points to the company's own nameservers and 25% when it does not.

In early April 2023 the free appraisal tool was re-based: "GoDaddy added a ton of new data to GoValue last month, which will have influenced valuations across the board." Investors documented names that had shown above $1,000 printing under $100 afterward. In March 2024 the tool was capped at three free appraisals a day and stopped showing comparable sales.

The same company holds inventory at scale: the Uniregistry portfolio of ~350,000 names ($196.9M, 2020), ~200,000 names from Marchex ($281M), 70,000 from Most Wanted Domains ($30–35M, 2015) — and runs pricing experiments on "tens of thousands" of its own names against control groups, reporting a 22% revenue lift from charm pricing in the $2,500–$10,000 band.

Public sales datasets lean toward the expiry stream by construction: auction results are captured automatically, while owner-listed sales on Afternic and Dan are reported only when a party volunteers them and Sedo reports only $2,000-plus. And on 118 real, publicly reported sales, two widely used third-party appraisers returned $0 on 70% of names that actually sold (EstiBot) and missed by a median of 100% and 94.5%; even the better of the two missed by 50% or more on 80% of names.