Artificial intelligence (AI) as a new phenomenon came into being around 2016 and rose into prominence ever since. Artificial Intelligence has now emerged as a buzzword that everyone wants to be associated with. Investors are keen to invest in any company or a startup using AI or even the bare mention of the word AI. Turns out AI is a good bait to lure investors these days.
Domain Space with .AI
Since AI as a buzzword is hot in the market, people in the domain name world get busy registering names and that’s just what is happening in the .AI space. Of Late, we have seen an interesting trend catching everyone’s fancy. Recent the buying behavior on the domain marketplace Sedo reflected the importance of buying .AI domain.
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As per the TLDInvestors.com blog titled “Someone is going on a .AI Shopping Spree” they have mentioned,
So the last few weeks, the Sedo country code sales have been filled with .Ai sales. The top two sales this week were .Ai sales. The week before .Ai took 12 of 27 reported ccTLD sales. There seems to be one company out of Beijing that is buying all these .Ai names.
A pattern is forming where domain name investors are buying up a lot of the top keywords in. AI. Many startup founders are attempting to bag this seemingly new domain name extension. Quite naturally, there is a lot of confusion around the .AI domain. We thought of clearing doubts by laying bare some facts that you might not have known about .AI domain names.
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Facts related to .AI domain name
- .AI is a ccTLD – Let us define what ccTLD is, to begin with. ccTLD is a Country Code Top Level Domain which means it is associated with a specific country. It is similar to a gTLD ( .COM, .NET, .ORG, etc.) the “g” in this case stands for generic. .AI is the Country Code Top Level Domain for Anguilla, like how we have .IT for Italy or .CA for Canada.
- .AI is not a new domain extension – Like the popular misconception, .AI domain is not new and was first introduced in 1995. Until 2009 you could not register a .AI domain without being a business or person in Anguilla so this explains why it hasn’t been as mainstream as the other extensions that you could register since the 1990s.
- Registration prices can be different based on where you buy – The price or cost of .AI domains vary dramatically when compared to.COM domains which have pretty consistent pricing. At Europe Registry a .AI will cost you $127.28 and you will have to agree to a two-year registration so the actual cost is over $250.
- Can buy .AI names from existing owners – In case the .AI domain you need is taken do not count it out completely. Domain name investor has been buying .AI at a rapid clip and with a quick email, you can find out how much you can buy an already registered one for. The price can range from under $1,000 to a few thousand dollars but in some cases, .AI names have been sold for absurd five-figures.
- An email will support – You can get an email at a .AI domain unlike what people say. Like most domains .AI supports MX records so you can send and receive email from your .AI domain name.
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In conclusion, these are priced domain names for sure. To give an example, if a domain such as Invest.com could cost you back by a million dollars, Invest.ai just was sold at a palatable $7000. As mentioned earlier, the trend is only catching up and not many people are aware of the .AI domain extension and this works in our favor. But then there are certain challenges involved around it as well, like that from the branding perspective.
