1 day ago
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YOUR AD HERE
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.
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