ccTLD

Pickleball player Ammar Kubba – founder of and investor in numerous domain industry companies – recently announced two .io domain name sales. The first sale was closed while he was playing pickleball. The second was closed while he was thinking about playing pickleball.

Notably, after sharing his second .io domain name sale, Ammar shared some background about other domain names with the same keyword. I found this noteworthy because the attributes of the other extensions were not what I would normally guess for a ~$10k .io domain name sale.

When it comes to domain industry trends, I am not a first mover. I probably own some trend-ish domain names, but my bread and butter remains good one or two word .coms.

For the past year or so, I have been keeping an eye on startups using .AI domain names and publicly reported .AI domain name sales. After seeing some friends and colleagues appear to have success with their own .AI domain names, I decided to buy my first .AI domain names. I succumbed to FOMO.

For a variety of reasons, I am not going to share the names I bought, but I will share some insight behind my purchase.

I missed the boat on .AI domain names. With very few exceptions – and perhaps to my detriment – I don’t generally like to try and acquire domain names in alternative extensions that are popular. For instance, I am pretty sure I never owned a .ME, .LY, or .IO domain name despite their trendiness at various points in time. I also haven’t owned a .AI domain name either. Maybe that will change this year.

According to NameBio, there were $5.5 million in publicly reported .AI domain name sales in 2023. This amount will likely increase as sales reports from the final couple of weeks of 2023 will be reported and recorded. In 2022, the sales volume was just under $900k. In 2021, the volume was $1.2m.

In the past couple of days, there have been numerous articles about Anguilla’s .AI ccTLD. I wrote about the InterNetX article, but several mainstream publications have subsequently written about the windfall .AI domain names have produced for the Caribbean nation of Anguilla.

Fortune and Ars Technica each published articles discussing the growth of .AI domain names. Importantly, the revenue from .AI domain name registrations and renewals has become a key economic driver for the nation. With the growth of ChatGPT and AI startup funding in general, many startups have turned to .AI domain names. Companies have registered .AI domain names, and I am sure domain investors have also registered .AI domain names with the hopes of reselling them.