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OpenAI bought the domain ai.com for $11M
- cpr 4y agoDamn, I let em.com go by accident way back in the early 90's.
- mavam 4y agoIs there a list somewhere with domain transactions > $10M? Curious to get a feel for the (subjective) value. There is probably a correlation in price with number of characters, vowels, etc.
- bombcar 4y agoI know during the dot com bubble some names sold for very large amounts, and there have been other cases recently (Facebook bought meta.com) Other than a small portion, people might be surprised how LITTLE domain names go for; I was involved in the purchase of a three character domain on one of the original TLDs that was only in the $5k range.
- elcomet 4y ago5k is still an outrageous amount of money for a domain name...
- marban 4y ago5k is a steal for a good name.
- rchaud 4y agoIs it? does the .com really matter now as it did 20 years ago? If you can afford $1m for a domain name, you can afford to advertise your site on search queries that specifically name your competitors.
- wizofaus 4y agoIf I see a link for a corporate site whose domain is not {company-name-or-abbreviation}.com I assume it's phishing spam.
- jaywalk 4y agoSupply and demand. A three-character .com/.net/.org domain name going for $5k is a pretty good deal in my book.
- Ayesh 4y ago> outrageous amount Squatters have a pretty strong HODL game, often lasting several years because it only costs $10/year for them.
- elcomet 4y agoThat's why I don't think squatting should be allowed. For company name, you can't just create thousand companies and resell their names. Domain squatting brings no value to society
- pcthrowaway 4y agoWe should start one. I know crypto.com was purchased for $12M in 2018
- smcn 4y agoNot the most up to date I believe but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_...
- luhn 4y agoThe top of that list is voice.com for $30mm, which is apparently an NFT art marketplace. The top-selling artist of all time has sold $100k worth of NFTs. The top-selling artist in the past 30 days has sold $425. Ouch. I do not think they made back their investment on that domain.
- smcn 4y agoHad to check that out and you're absolutely right but you missed out that the top selling artist of all time is actor John Cusack. For some reason that's bamboozling me. https://www.voice.com/johncusack https://www.voice.com/johncusack https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1478052897388732429?lang=en https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1478052897388732429?la...
- brunoborges 4y agoNo matter how many TLDs are created, .com is what matters.
- mcyger 4y agoNameBio.com is a database that includes both wholesale and retail domain name sales. Yes, there is a correlation between number of characters and price. There are many other correlations as well.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 4y agoIt was registered way back in 1993. So not feeling bad now about losing the big bucks on it. Interestingly, it was registered via Google domains :-) https://www.whois.com/whois/ai.com https://www.whois.com/whois/ai.com
- taylorfinley 4y agoThis suggests OpenAI has peaked and will begin its slow fade to irrelevancy. Ai.com Superbowl ad next year will really seal the deal.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y agoCf. C. Northcote Parkinson’s essay ‘Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block.’
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elil17 4y agoOpenAI has raised $11 billion. $11 million is a drop in the bucket for them if it gets them more customers, more job applicants, etc.
- ldargin 4y agoAs it stands, its 3000 drops in a 3 gallon bucket.
- 93po 4y agoIt's 4 months out of 348 years.
- elil17 4y agoIt’s 11 million bananas out of 11 billion bananas
- elil17 4y agoI think it would actually be 227 drops in a 3 gallon bucket. However it's important to consider that it would be a mere 19 drops in a 1 quart pail. (based on 75k drops per gallon)
- 4y ago
- ck2 4y agoDo people even see domain names anymore with browsers so minimal and everyone using "apps" Do they even type them in anymore? They certainly can't brand "AI" since even just paying that much for it as a domain demonstrates it can't be trademarked or it would have been a $3000 UDRP
- cyanf 4y agoThey could brand themself as “ai.com”
- Destitute 4y agoOwning a given .com seems to instill a sense of authority on the matter for branding purposes. I don't think it has the same effect like back in the 90's where people may have just guessed at domain names to find something in lieu of a search engine, or like AOL Keywords, but they still do have a bit of prestige and seem to signal some kind of trust on the matter to most. That being said, nowadays it just doesn't end at a generic TLD, and just by way of owning ai.com they are not going (or expecting) to suddenly see huge influxes of users and traffic... but used in conjunction with ad spots that call out ai.com it's a lot easier to start positioning that authority.
- peter422 4y agoOne aspect of a profit capped company is that as they start to make more and more revenue (and profit) they’ll be heavily incentivized to just invest it all back into employees or datacenters or 8 figure domain names since the for company can’t keep the extra profit anyways.
- mertd 4y agoIt says the profits are capped at 100x of any investment and it is also known that MSFT invested $10B. So looks like they have some headroom before needing such accounting?
- peter422 4y agoThe cap goes down as the company gets bigger and bigger, I doubt Microsoft is at the 100x number. But regardless of what exactly the cap is, it creates an incentive for the company to operate as close to 0 profit as possible because there is much less incentive for excess profit… they don’t get to keep it. But they do get to keep anything that is a reasonable business expense.
- Jensson 4y agoHow many companies ever has paid out a total of 1 trillion dollars? I don't think any current companies has.
- clickok 4y agoDamn. I bought rl.ai when I was a grad student but it's been laying fallow since I can't really blog about the stuff I'm working on right now. How does one go about selling their domain for millions of dollars?
- elil17 4y agorl.ai is probably not so valuable. Everyone now knows the word "AI," but only specialists know "RL"
- pavlov 4y agoWhat’s RL? “Real life” is the only thing that comes to mind.
- ilkke 4y agoI was betting on 'roguelike'
- profstasiak 4y agoreinforcment learning
- rvz 4y agoExactly. That is why it is probably not valuable.
- pavlov 4y agoOk, thanks. Short names on these popular country TLDs are probably not as valuable as they might seem. I used to own a NN.io domain name where NN was a common financial abbreviation. I thought it might be fairly valuable, but I ended up selling at auction for less than $3k. (That was before the crypto boom. Maybe it could have fetched more if I’d waited several years and sold in 2021. It seems like there was a short moment when even relatively crap .xyz domains sold for five figures.)
- manimino 4y ago
- gist 4y agoThere is nothing credible to indicate that it actually sold for $11m that was apparently the asking price. It could have sold for more it could have sold for vastly less. https://domaininvesting.com/ai-com-forwarding-chatgpt/ https://domaininvesting.com/ai-com-forwarding-chatgpt/
- downvotetruth 4y agoQualcomm appears to have the relevant "AI" trademark: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97713612&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97713612&caseType=SERIAL_...
- kumarm 4y agoFYI: You can't share TESS links that way. They don't work.
- downvotetruth 4y agoAnnoying - updated to alternative link with disclaimer that it appears to require JS, thanks.
- elil17 4y ago$11 million is not a confirmed number. The company who brokered a prior trade of ai.com in 2021 said the asking price was $11m, but that they are not going to share the final price of that prior transaction. But, I have not been able to find any information about the price of this most recent sale of the name.
- bobbyi 4y agoThey bought ai.com and have it redirecting to chat.openai.com, but as far as I can tell they don't own chatgpt.com? There must be a lot of people hearing about chatgpt and trying that address
- honkler 4y agoRebranding soon? Would be quite apt since they aren't "open" anymore.
- cassonmars 4y agoWhoa, cool to see Warpcast on the front page of HN
- psychphysic 4y agoMaking good use of that Microsoft dollar I see.
- ShannonLimiter 4y agoThey did not. AI.com redirects to a-i.com. This may have been a publicity stunt by the owner to get traffic.
- kelthuzad 4y agoI've just tried it and it opened openai's chatgpt
- testplzignore 4y agoSomething weird: ai.org redirects to in.gov. I wonder if the Indiana state government knows they own that domain...