2023 has seen a notable surge within the transactional value of .ai domains. Originally, “.ai” is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Anguilla. Nonetheless, on account of “AI” being the abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence – arguably probably the most disruptive industry of our generation – the domain extension has gained significant tech relevance.
These sales are heralding a brand new digital gold rush.
October tenth, 2023, entered the record books when the domain name you.ai was acquired for $700,000. Initially it was believed that it can have been purchased by You.com, a search engine that heavily leverages the facility of Generative AI. After a couple of days it was revealed that the domain name was purchased by Dharmesh Shah, the Founding father of HubSpot. He isn’t any stranger to splurging on domains, having purchased Connect.com for $8,000,000 in 2022.
In the event you visit you.ai today, it shares the identical content as Dharmesh.ai.
Compare the above amount to the previous record of $258,888 for Stack.ai in August, 2023. Every week before that NPC.ai sold for $250,000.
The stats are also impressive when reviewing transactional volume.
Today, NameBio showed 2,160 .ai sales yr up to now value $4.5m, in contrast to 2022, there have been 718 total .ai domain name sales value $878,700.
From taking a look at the 2022 sales data the very best recorded sale was for $65,098 for the domain Arena.ai, other notable mentions included Ledger.ai for $33,333 and $30,050 for Predictive.ai.
Let’s compare this to 2019, once I acquired Unite.ai for $537. On the time I believed that deep reinforcement learning algorithms would eventually result in an AI explosion, and it only made sense that the AI industry would adopt the .ai extension.
This followed the identical playbook that was shown throughout the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of 2017, when every blockchain and crypto company adopted the .io domain extension. An extension that was soon after adopted by leading tech startups.
Hence Unite.ai was born, and it serves for example of the value difference between 2019 and 2023. Below are additional examples based alone personal acquisitions.
it ought to be noted that my goal was never to amass an in depth .ai domain name portfolio, the goal was as a substitute to amass a network of brandable domains, and to partner with leading AI corporations to launch market solutions based on the following wave of technological innovation.
A simple price comparison, is when anticipating that genomics would want deep learning to scale, I acquired Genes.ai for $677. Compare that to Gene.ai that sold in 2022 for $25,553.
One other notable domain that I acquired was Genius.ai in late 2020 for $16,025. On the time I intended to construct a fresh approach at a search engine that will use deep reinforcement learning with human feedback.
Fast forward to today and a personal offer was recently made to amass the Genius.ai domain for $500,000.
My last price comparison is in May 2020, I participated in a bidding frenzy, whereby I ended up outbidding everyone to win Think.ai for $21,988, on the time this was reported to be the 4th highest reported .ai sale of all time. It’s difficult to assume that this domain name would sell for lower than 10x that in 2023.
It ought to be interesting to see how long it takes before the market hears of the primary million dollar .ai domain name acquisition.