The most popular auction events in the last year have been the monthly .AI expiry auctions held by the .AI registry in Anguilla. Apparently, there has been a dearth of non-paying bidders who participate in these auctions. As a result, the .AI registry is making a change.
Vincent Cate, the person who manages the .AI registry on behalf of Anguilla, announced two changes that are being made with the hope of discouraging and/or eliminating the number of non-paying bidders:
Yesterday, I saw a headline that an AI company called Cognition AI had raised $21 million in funding:
Cognition AI, which offers a Copilot-like coding assistant that, the startup says, can finish whole projects, raised $21M from Founders Fund, Elad Gil, and more (@ashleevance / Bloomberg)https://t.co/xbxGGDOhp1
📫 Subscribe: https://t.co/OyWeKSRpIMhttps://t.co/TsSDhNJqnC
— Techmeme (@Techmeme) March 12, 2024
From what I’ve read on Namepros and elsewhere, I believe Igor Gabrielan must hold one of the largest portfolios of good .AI domain names. I think his portfolio of domain names can be found at ai-names.com, which links to an aged thread on the PR.ai forum. I don’t know if that list is current, but it is quite lengthy and contains some strong domain names like Apps.ai, Assistants.ai, Competition.ai, Library.ai….etc.
I don’t think I’ve ever communicated with Igor, and I don’t know much about him. He shared a story about what it was like to register .AI domain names back in 2011, and I thought it was pretty interesting.
Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) are internet domain name extensions that are designated for a country or sovereign state. Each is identified by two-letter codes such as .IT for Italy, .CA for Canada, and .IN for India. The primary purpose of a ccTLD is to show its association with a particular geographical locations.
In addition to its local usage, ccTLD domain names have long been used as .com alternatives or for domain name hacks. For instance, years ago, the .LY extension was popular because of services like Bitly. More recently .AI and .IO have become popular domain name extensions that are sought after by companies and domain investors alike from around the world.
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.
Earlier this week, I bought my first .AI domain names. I have been looking at aftermarket options, but my level of risk tolerance for these domain names is below what it would take to purchase anything worthwhile right now. As a result, my first .AI domain names were hand registrations.
The alternatives to hand registering domain names are aftermarket acquisitions or expiry auctions operated by the .AI registry.
