The aftermarket for .AI domain names has grown tremendously over the last several years. A look at Namebio shows the growing annual dollar volume of sales that were publicly reported in the aftermarket.
- 2018: $420.8k
- 2019: $1.1m
- 2020: $1.1m
- 2021: $1.2m
- 2022: $878.7k
- 2023: $5.6m
- 2024: $11.7m
- 2025 YTD: $3.2m (my guess is $20m+ for the year)
These aftermarket sales figures do not take into account the number of domain names that have been hand registered by buyers for the registration fee. The .AI registry requires a 2 year registration, and the cost is approaching $100/year. By all accounts, the number of .AI registrations is also growing at a considerable rate.
I missed out on this extension. Each time I looked at auction prices, I felt they were inflated. Good/marketable one word .AI domain names have been selling for thousands of dollars for several years. In order to participate in that market and be profitable for the last few years, I presume investors with larger portfolios have had to spend serious money acquiring the best domain names. I don’t know how the metrics look for an investor with a large portfolio, but I think I would have been better off had I acquired some of the better one word .ai domain names that sold in auction.
At the moment, I own 9 .AI domain names. My 3 favorites are Wham.ai, Jackrabbit.ai, and Pinwheel.ai. All three of these were purchased via expiry auction.
Luc Biggs posted on X about the number of remaining 3 letter .AI domain names that are available to register:
Timestamp: 10th March 2025, 12:17pm.
82% of the supply of https://t.co/JHLuSkktvi is now registered.
225 have been registered in the last 4-5 days alone…
I wonder if the $50,000 sale of https://t.co/DZLHFEPBKB sale ignited these registrations?Triple premium… pic.twitter.com/g8nDlesqWk
— Luc Biggs (@LucBiggs) March 10, 2025
In the past, there have been different categories of domain names that were registered by speculators en masse. As the entire category of names became registered, there was some FOMO and people spent more to acquire these and similar domain names because of the perceived rarity. I think buying a certain type of domain name simply because the perception of rarity an exclusivity is unwise.
I suspect investors have been speculating on 3 letter .AI domain names hoping to catch some lightning in a bottle, but that’s not something I am planning to do. I doubt there are many commercially viable and marketable domain names sitting unregistered at this point, and I don’t think 3L .ai domain names are particularly rare considering there are alternatives – like [abc]AI.com or alternative extensions, for example. I don’t know if an end user buyer would be willing to pay a premium for a 3 random letter .AI domain name when that same AI.com or LLL .io is unregistered and available to buy for less than $50.
I do know there is a large renewal cost associated with .AI names. Assuming even an aggressive 3% STR, an investor would need to spend a lot of money and hope to get lucky numerous times to make a decent ROI. Of course, there are many sayings about risk and spending money to make money, so to each his own.
For my portfolio, I will continue to seek out good – commercially marketable – .AI domain names that I believe will be in demand by end user buyers – and try to acquire them for reasonably good prices. I will leave the longertail names alone though.
For every person who makes a .ai sale, thousands pay exorbitant renewal fees without ever selling, holding a dream, renewing a dream. Even among those who found some success with .AI, many have lost significantly on other extensions, or inevitably will on future ones. Remember NFT’s? How many had those high highs, just to hit those low lows?
Chasing trends is a tough game with far more losers than winners. The smart ones don’t chase trends, they sell shovels or concentrate in stable assets.
I’m sticking with .com domains. No regrets.
yuppper dot com is king and regardless of what extensions the websites use…..all leads to the road of BullShitWebsites.com
Don’t forget to listen to the BS song– uplifting and the #1 song on the Billboard.
https://bullshitwebsites.com/bullshitwebsites-song/
Have a good BS day!
I am on the warm beaches in Da Nang drinking fresh coconut and mango and durian.
Long tails get stepped on and crushed.
Including long-tailed AIs.
.ai renewals are killer but they may rise soon. Anguilla has the market incentive to double or triple renewal price or seize .ai domains on a whim.
What’s to stop the registry from raising renewal prices to $200 next year?
They’d love to clawback many of those .ai domains to sell directly to end-users.
Tough extension to invest in at this juncture. I’ll stick with old reliable dotcom.
Yes, I registered only 160 .ai domains (single word taken in over 200 extensions) in 2016
My mistake, I should have regged 1000 plus in 2016
Fortune favors the bold, and I was way too careful
With the proceeds so far from .AI sales, I purchased some super .com domains and a vacation home in Portugal
and I still own 60 top .AI domains
if ,ai crashes and I doubt it will, I already cashed in
when I saw a company that had the .com also purchased the .ai last week for a large amount, this was surprising
Very nice!
Curious why you aren’t ploughing more money into .AI domain names. Do you think they have peaked?
Good question, Elliot.
I purchased some .ai domains on the former .ai expired auctions by the .ai registry and on Namecheap (and usually competing against 2 domain investors I know, so I often just drop out)
But the big reason: I acquired those .ai domains for reg fees back in 2016, and keywords of that caliber will cost me 5 or 6 figures these days, so I decide to just buy the best .com domains I can.
Do I think they’ve peaked? I don’t they think they have, as I still see solid .ai sales. But I’m not getting as many offers as I used to for my .ai domains, and I believe this can be attributed to my high BIN prices, as opposed to “Make Offer”.
I probably need to tweak the landers.
Funding is still being plowed into Ai companies… not all will go for or be able to buy a single keyword .AI domain.
I’ve made approx 100 .AI domain sales since late 2016 — most occurring between 2021-2023 — and most sales came to me via brokers, or afternic and maybe 15 on Sedo Auctions.
I’ve made only 3 domain sales for Ai___.com and ____ai.com — and I thought there would be more of these, as I own close to 150 of these — a strong keyword preceded or followed by AI.
.AI has been good to me.
But I’m still a .com guy.
Will this .AI run continue?
I have no idea
The biggest .AI domain investor in the world is a princeling from China. He bought about 15 .ai domains from me in 2017 in the low to mid 4 figure range. He’s got them for sale at a minimum 150 K each these days. And he has had some big time .AI sales to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, so I assume it’s all icing on the cake for him at this point.
I tried to buy some of my former .AI domains back from him at 2X and 3X the selling price on 5, and he declined.
one more thing:
I’ve heard different domains investors, including a friend, discuss the background of the Chinese princeling who owns over 3000 .ai domains (80 percent are excellent….lots of short keywords, LL, NN, but at least 10 percent have TM issues) … and yes, he claimed to have struggled to pay for all these reg fees before his big sales occurred.
But I know he also sold a multimedia company he founded in China for big-time money, so he had lots of money to play with and he went all in ONLY on .AI. He has at least 3 kids and a wife and a few other ventures. I know he received major money for an .AI domain acquired by Google among other tech companies,
And there were others who jumped on the .AI train in 2016 — a gentleman from the Ukraine, a prominent VC in Silicon Valley and a few others that have been mentioned.
And of course the Booth brothers have done extremely well with their .ai acquisitions and sales. They purchased some really top .AI domains and these investments have paid off well. Good guys. And of course they have great .com and io domains as well.