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OpenAI spent $10M on chat.com URL
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42067474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42067474
- echoangle 2y agoCorrection for the title: They spent more than $15.5 million, according to the article
- red2awn 2y ago"Chat (formerly ChatGPT)"
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoDeprecating ChatGPT as a brand would be the stupidest marketing decision since New Coke.
- xp84 2y agoYes, but not for the same reason. IMHO the stupid part would be because they can't get a trademark on a completely generic term, so 1000 competitors and knockoffs would be diluting their brand equity and SEO.
- burgerrito 2y agoWait until you found out about X
- amadeuspagel 2y agoNew Coke was actually a terrific marketing decision. Before New Coke, Pepsi was about to take over. New Coke made people realize how much they loved the old coke.
- blitzar 2y agoNaming rights for a stadium up next surely?
- xp84 2y agoYeah what did they do with that FTX stadium? :D
- uses 2y agoSomeone educated me on this type of thing a while back. Chat.com - and other highly reusable URLs - is a non-deteriorating asset that has a value on OpenAI's ledger somewhere. It's not like they bought $10,000,000 worth of catering or fuel or labor even buildings. Because someday, the owning entity can sell it for about what they spent on it. And I imagine there is some kind of financial instrument to take out a loan with the domain as collateral. My point is, it's not really like they "spent" the money as much as they just parked it in a domain name.
- paulddraper 2y agoThey definitely bought it. Though you are correct it is a durable asset. (As are buildings.)
- solarkraft 2y agoThat it keeps its value is a huge assumption.
- xp84 2y agoGP said highly reusable URLs. Roughly by definition, it's enduringly desirable. It is valuable in a way that say, Kmart dot com is not, since it has an open-ended set of uses. I chose the Kmart example because that domain is associated with a specific brand that's universally known to be irrelevant, which caps its value to whatever cash one could make "redirect to affiliate links" generate with random legacy traffic it gets. You wouldn't use it for a dating site, or even for a grocery delivery startup. A 'temporarily reusable' tier might be something like "DVD dot com" or "rtx dot com" or something -- presumably there's a lot less money in DVD than there was 20 years ago, and presumably raytracing won't be an exciting high-end thing people are excited about 20 years from now. They're valuable and quite reusable at one point, but could become low-value by the time the company decides to unload them.
- sigmoid10 2y agoI'd say any single syllable common english word .com url has a high intrinsic value that will not go down unless english stops being the de facto lingua franca of the internet.
- pixelsort 2y agoCould I get 1% as much for snugchat.com? Tempting, but I think I'd still rather build it out; especially now.
- tester756 2y agoI do wonder what the RoI is here 15M is like one month of salaries for 500 engineers, so like 40% of their whole eng. team
- eejjjj82 2y agoIn Q3 2024 Google spent $7.2B on "Sales & Marketing Expenses". The data is not broken down more granularly. If 50% of that is pure "Marketing Expense" then you'll see that the scale of the market these players are competing for is worth $3.5B PER QUARTER in operating expenses to attract customers. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204424000118/goog-20240930.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204424... If you add a $15M one time capital expense to this then it doesn't even appear as a rounding error on this cash flow statement. Acquiring a long term asset acting as a pillar of your marketing strategy then it begins to look like a very good deal.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tester756 2y agoSure, you can have very sound theory to justify that But how do we measure it? How can we tell that it was successful / good idea or not? Even things like what is the difference between "chat.com" and "chat.ai"? Would "chat.ai" for 1M be more efficient than "chat.com" for 15M?
- k2xl 2y agoNot to dispute the main point you are making, but that's assuming 360K salary. OpenAI engineers make significantly more than that.
- mpaepper 2y agoOn X it was mentioned that the seller received part of the compensation in OpenAI stock.
- kyawzazaw 2y agodefinitely more than that
- rcxdude 2y agoshades of .com bubble
- amadeuspagel 2y agoBased. I hope they plaster this on billboards everywhere. Bring back the dotcom. I'm tired of seeing people advertise names and then hearing them whine that someone else advertises for the name on Google or that people search the app store and find some kind of wrapper.
- tmpz22 2y agoDotcom is really expensive. It prices out entrepreneurs who aren’t independently wealthy or take on usurious venture capital terms.
- Amir6 2y agoThis domain was purchased by Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot’s cofounder and CTO) for 8 million a couple of months ago.