In a few months it will be James Iles three year anniversary at GoDaddy. Previous to working at GoDaddy James was an active blogger at JamesNames.com. James has always been one of the most helpful people at GoDaddy in my opinion, whenever I have a question he finds the answer.
I wanted to see what was up with James and how his role has evolved over the last three years at GoDaddy.
Q1) This December it will be three years working at GoDaddy as the domain investment community manager. Has the job met your expectations?
It has completely exceeded my expectations. In one of my interviews when I applied, they asked me why I wanted to do this. I said that I wanted to be out of my comfort zone… the only way that you grow as a person, is to challenge yourself outside of your comfort zone.
My job at GoDaddy does that every day, and I’ve learned more about our domain industry in the past 2 ½ years at GoDaddy than I had since getting started in the industry in 2008. I’ve also had the pleasure of attending numerous conferences for GoDaddy and connecting with more and more of the people who make up our domaining community.
Q2) How has your role evolved over the years?
When I first joined, the focus was primarily on getting a pulse of the community’s sentiment and feedback for GoDaddy. That has evolved into a deeper collaboration across all domain investor-focused teams, in particular with product, marketing, and support teams.
Beyond community management and engagement, I’ve expanded into other areas of our business marketing, but always focused on domain investors.
Q3) Afternic publishes a monthly top keywords sold list each month, would there ever be a time to get exact numbers? For example AI was top keyword with 150 ai related domains sold in X month?
Afternic’s keywords have become a consistent staple for domain investors. While we can’t easily give out specifics as GoDaddy’s a public company, the keyword information has a valuable place in the strategies of many domainers.
A bigger picture of how keywords are performing at Afternic is what we can provide at the moment, but they do create good questions and conversations that we can delve into, such as keyword positioning (does AI perform better as a prefix, or suffix, for example).
If anyone has any questions or requests for data releases, please feel free to connect with me. My email is jiles@godaddy.com.
Q4) I get asked all the time from newer investors, “Why should I sign up for Domain Academy?” Give me what you feel are the best selling points?
Back in 2019, before I joined GoDaddy, I worked with Mike Cyger on some content for Domain Academy. Now that I’m at GoDaddy, I’m pleased to be continuing the close alignment with Domain Academy, and Joe, who’s doing a fantastic job running it now.
I believe that Domain Academy is the starting point for domain investors in the industry. Foundational knowledge is extremely important and Domain Academy pulls all of the key information together into one self-paced course.
If you’re a newer investor, Domain Academy is an excellent place to start. Beyond the course, there’s a suite of tools that investors can access, which essentially pull in a lot of different services under one roof.
Q5) Afternic now has self brokerage and LTO. What has the response been from the domain community, has it met or exceeded your expectations?
These are two very different but impactful features that both came from Dan.com. If you think about LTO in a wider context it is a potentially powerful way of generating recurring income for your portfolio. Especially when you begin compounding the LTOs and receiving multiple revenue streams.
Recurring revenue has always been an ideal state for domain investors. Initially that was through parking, but that has waned, and attention has largely moved towards LTO.
GoDaddy took Dan.com’s LTO technology and integrated it into the search path, which is a first for the industry which has propelled LTO sales, and overall investors have welcomed LTO into their strategies.
Self-Brokerage at Afternic is much newer concept – and for domain investors with DDC Domain Pro, it’s a route to handling leads yourself under the GoDaddy brand.
Feedback from sellers using Self-Brokerage has been particularly important to its development; we’ve added new insights, LTO, message read statuses, and reduced friction in the offer submission. Early findings there showed a 45%+ increase in leads.
Q6) Can you tell us what’s next for Afternic as far as features and tools?
I interviewed Afternic’s Product Manager, Prakash, earlier this year to see what we could expect for 2025. This always evolves, though, and customer feedback plays a key part in this.
I have weekly meetings with Prakash, and we focus on real investor stories, feedback, and how we can bring more to the table.
You can expect to see agentic AI strategically used within the Afternic experience, as well as buyer-side improvements, and reduced friction between your GoDaddy domains and your Afternic listings.
We also have some exciting plans to leverage AI for demand generation, to sell even more domains for sellers.
It’s important to say that Afternic advances with your feedback. The thousands of pieces of feedback we’ve received over the last 2 ½ years have shaped the Afternic product roadmap more than many investors may know. Got feedback for Afternic? Let us know at domaincommunity@godaddy.com.
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Three questions:
1) Why is LTO capped at 100K?
2) Why does GoDaddy hold names for 60 days?
3) Why does GoDaddy show archaic sales as comps that have absolutely no relevancy to today’s market?
Very good read, thank you James and Raymond.