ABM just dropped one of the most valuable pieces of knowledge that has ever been shared in the domain industry, and most people are going to miss it because it was a reply to a reply. In August of last year I did a pretty lengthy post breaking down the realities of the aftermarket, trying to help people understand what percentage of sales come directly from "for sale" landing pages, what percentage come from distribution networks, and of the network sales which come from each major distribution partner. The reason I did that was to show the math on what happens if you list at Afternic and use their landers, versus using other landers with discounted commissions. What I essentially proved was that even if the alt lander has a 0% commission, you still end up worse off due to Afternic's commission penalty for not using their landers. I'll link to that post in the replies if you want to do a deep dive and really understand the full picture. But in short, around 60-65% of domain sales come from Afternic DLS and Sedo MLS (the distribution networks), and the remaining 35-40% come from the "for sale" landers directly. This is confirmed by multiple large portfolio holders. There were still two important questions that I was unable to answer though: The first is what would happen if you fully delisted from Afternic, so they couldn't sell your domains at the 25-30% punitive rate while using alt landers. The theory a lot of people shared was that the network buyers, not being able to find you on the network, would still find you by typing in the domain. I wasn't buying it. Sure, it'll happen sometimes, but I was almost certain it would be an extreme minority, and the move would be a major net negative. My theory was that a vast majority of network buyers were either shown your domain as an alternative to what they were actually searching, or when brainstorming a bunch of different domains. And they wouldn't have found it without the network, because they weren't typing domains into their browser's address bar to check availability. They were using a registrar. But I couldn't prove it because I've never fully delisted from Afternic and Sedo to find out, and I didn't know anyone who has and then talked about it. Until now. Thanks to ABM we now have that missing piece of the puzzle; he said sales dropped 50% by delisting. That means if his sales breakdown was 40% landers 60% network, only 17% of network buyers would buy directly if it wasn't on the network. Or if his breakdown was 35% landers and 65% network, only 23% would buy directly if it wasn't on the network. Let that sink in. Between 77% and 83% of network buyers will NOT buy your domain directly from your discount-commission landers if you are not on the distribution networks. If you scroll up on ABM's reply below, you'll see it was a reply to a comment I made predicting this "50% drop" outcome pretty much on the nose. The second looming question is what would happen if you raised your prices on Afternic and Sedo to offset the higher commissions and then used your own landers with low or no commissions offering the domain at a lower price. A lot of people think this is "free money" for network sales by baking in the commission. But I know that it will, for the most part, hurt your sell-through rate quite a bit. I can't quantify it, but I suspect it would almost definitely more than offset the commission penalties you were hoping to recoup. It just seems logical, if you hurt your STR on 65% of your sales to get a slightly better commission on 35% of your sales, you're probably going to lose. Except in the situation where most of your domains are priced below $2k; at that level you can raise prices without affecting the demand curve. I selfishly hope ABM will test this next by relisting at Afternic and Sedo, but at higher prices than shown on his NamePros Landers; enough that he would net the same wherever it sells. That would answer the last remaining question surrounding the economics of the domain aftermarket: is it even possible to offset a commission by raising prices? My money is on "no". But once we know that, we'd be able to fully model out all possible outcomes and make perfectly informed decisions to maximize revenue based on all the various marketplace commission structures and "for sale" lander options. Regardless, I hope ABM stops this delisting experiment for both his and Jamie's sake. It's already been running long enough to learn everything there is to learn from it. It's painfully obvious that a 50% drop in sales to save 15-20% on commission isn't a winning move. Let's say he was doing $1 million in sales a year and netting $800k after commission. Now he would have about $500k in sales, netting maybe $480k after transaction costs. That means he probably spent around $320k to learn this lesson. We all owe ABM an enormous debt of gratitude for generously sharing what he learned with everyone.