原文：https://www.namepros.com/blog/the-ai-domain-extension-sales-pricing-auctions-use.1295250/
作者：Bob Hawkes
日期：Feb 16, 2023
最近对人工智能如此感兴趣，一位 NamePros 成员建议我应该看看 .ai 域名扩展。
虽然几乎可以肯定 .com 是大型、成熟的人工智能公司的主要扩展名，但 .ai 也找到了吸引力，特别是在一些人工智能初创公司中。
顺便说一下，如果你错过了，AI.com域名最近开始重定向到 OpenAI ChatGPT。该域名的出售发生在 2021 年，Saw担任经纪人，OpenAI 是买家。
.AI 是什么？
.ai扩展名是安圭拉的国家代码，位于加勒比海的英国海外领土。安圭拉位于波多黎各和英属维尔京群岛的东部附近。
安圭拉人口不到2万，国土总面积只有91平方公里左右。拥有令人难以置信的自然美景，最重要的产业是旅游业，以及离岸公司和银行服务。
虽然最感兴趣的是带有 .ai 扩展名的二级域名，但也可以购买三级域名，包括 off.ai、com.ai、net.ai 和 org.ai。
注册并不便宜
虽然 .ai 扩展名不受限制，任何人都可以注册以在任何部门使用，但它并不便宜。顶级域名列表显示年度注册和续订的起价约为每年 65 美元，而且在许多注册商处要高得多。注册表也坚持两年的注册期。
几乎没有滥用
虽然高成本让一些投资者望而却步，但好处是高成本 TLD 通常具有非常低的滥用水平，对于 .ai 来说也是如此。SPAMHAUS显示只有 0.3% 的活动域是“坏的”，坏度得分为 0.01，几乎没有垃圾邮件或其他滥用行为。
下面列出的.AI 大销售额 是NameBio
中记录的 25,000 美元或更多的 .ai 扩展销售额，以及销售年份。
expert.ai，107,495 美元，2020 年
music.ai，101,500 美元，2018 年
arena.ai，65,098 美元，2022 年
samur.ai，50,000 美元，2021 年
analytics.ai，50,000 美元，2019 年
personal.ai，48,636 美元，2021 年
growth.ai，45,000 美元，2021 年
human.ai，45,000 美元，2017 年
workflow.ai，35,000 美元，2023 年
ledger.ai，33,333 美元，2022 年
predictive.ai，30,050 美元，2022 年
board.ai，29,522 美元，2021 年
conv.ai，28,000 美元，2021 年
face.ai，26,916 美元，2022 年
gene.ai，25,553 美元，2022 年
wow.ai，25,050 美元，2022 年
avatar.ai，25,000 美元，2022 年
content.ai，25,000 美元，2019 年
榜单显示，.ai 中几乎所有精英级别的销售都是单字域名。
大多数值得注意的零售额都来自过去几年。不过，有些令人惊讶的是，如果我们看一下总销量，根据我的年初分析， 2022 年比前三年有所下降。
这是NameBio 列出的所有 1000 美元及以上的 .ai 扩展销售的链接。
1000 美元以上 .AI 销售额的特征
在撰写本文时，NameBio 在所有时间段内共有6089 笔 .ai 销售额（100 美元以上），其中 1107 笔在 1000 美元及以上，61 笔在 10,000 美元以上。
我看了一下仅过去 3 年的1000 美元及以上销售额。共有662 笔销售额，总计 250 万美元。您可以在此 NameBio 链接中查看列表。我观察到以下情况：
大多数是单个英文单词名称。
虽然有些是技术术语，但更多是常用词。
只有 3 个包含数字，并且没有连字符。
几乎75% 的销售额是长度为 4 到 8 个字符的名称，请参见下图。
出售的动物有鹰、大象、逆戟鲸、大猩猩、土狼、猴子、鸭子和企鹅等15种动物。
图片长度.png
销售价格分布
对于过去三年中售价超过 1000 美元的名称，我查看了价格分布。以下结果基于 NameBio 报告的销售额，表明大多数.ai 名称的售价低于 3000 美元，尽管有些售价更高。48.2% 的销售额在 1000 美元到 1999 美元之间。
图片-SalesPrice.png
销售率如何？
根据Dofo Advanced Search 的数据，2023 年 2 月 8 日，Dofo 包含的市场上列出了 15,253 个 .ai 域名待售。NameBio 显示在过去 12 个月中有 317 个 .ai 销售额，其中一个包括500 美元及以上的销售额。综合这些数据，表明表观销售率为 2.1%。
如果看一下100 美元及以上的所有销售额，在过去 12 个月中，NameBio 上有 846 笔 .ai 销售额，表明明显的销售率为 5.6%。
这些销售率大大高于大多数其他扩展，具有 1% 或更低的表观销售率。请记住，未报告的销售额会增加这些比率。
但是，必须考虑到高昂的持有成本。如果将 5.6% 的 STR 乘以 1230 美元的平均价格，就会得到 68 美元，这与持有成本相似。
根据 NameBio，我使用 Dofo 销售数量和最近 12 个月的销售美元数量来计算当前的DVPL，Dollar Volume Per Listing。DVPL 售价约为 68 美元在最近的 12 个月里，令人印象深刻，直到人们想起续订成本也是如此。整个行业的明显 DVPL 约为 7.25 美元。请记住，NameBio 不报告大部分零售额，因此 DVPL 的真实价值会更高。
Domainers 如何为 .AI 域名定价？
我使用Dofo Advanced Search查看域名持有者如何为他们的 .ai 域名定价，得到以下结果。
图片询价.png
分布情况令人惊讶，其中45.9% 的价格在 25,000 美元到 29,999 美元之间。无论是因为一个或少数投资者持有该范围内的许多 .ai 名称和价格，还是只是发生在许多投资者身上，我都没有在我检查过的其他扩展中看到这种集中。
最高要价为 1000 万美元，由几个名字分享。有趣的是，加拿大总理贾斯汀特鲁多的名字就是其中之一。
有43 个 .ai 名字的价格在 100 万美元或以上。
每月 AI 拍卖
.ai 扩展不会将要拍卖的域名发送到通常的过期拍卖市场，或Park.io. 相反，从 2018 年秋季开始，.ai 注册管理机构每月对过期的 .ai 名称进行一次拍卖。拍卖网站是auctions.whois.ai。
在 auctions.whois.ai 上创建帐户是免费的，但您需要存入押金才能对域名进行竞价。这是有关拍卖过程的信息。另请阅读AI 拍卖常见问题解答。
最低存款额为 100 美元。有取回押金的程序，但它们涉及延误和收费。
拍卖会在每个月的第四个星期五安圭拉时间中午开始。安圭拉时间比东部时区早 1 小时。
除非您被认为是值得信赖的投标人，在过去 6 个月内为拍卖的名称出价并支付过费用，否则您还需要存入至少为出价金额 25% 的押金。
投标期为10天。如果最后有人出价，则将拍卖时间延长一小时。
最低起拍价为 120 美元。
投资者出价达到最大金额，系统会自动应用比之前的最高出价高出 10 美元的出价。例如，如果您出价 250 美元，其他出价最高的人是 160 美元，它将代表您出价 170 美元，然后如果有新的出价高于您的出价，则再次出价。
拍卖结束后，您有 2 周的时间来完成付款。如果赢得拍卖的人不付款，他们的帐户余额将被没收 100 美元。该域名将参加下个月的拍卖。
在 .ai 拍卖中赢得域名并付款后，您可以将其转让给您选择的注册商。
他们已经获得了 Park.io 使用的软件的许可，所以如果您熟悉那里的拍卖，它看起来会很眼熟。
没有收到投标的名称将在正常拍卖结束一天后到期并发布。
NameBio 报告 .ai 拍卖结果，因此每个月的某一天都会报告很多 .ai 销售情况。由于出价较晚，第二天会报告一些销售情况。
我怀疑虽然大多数竞标者都是域名投资者，但也有一些最终用户也在 .ai 拍卖中竞标。2022 年 9 月，arena.ai 在 Whois.AI 上的最高拍卖价为 65,098 美元
。AI 扩展使用
扩展使用的一个简单指标是查看Google 搜索带来了多少结果。site:.aiAI有 3990 万个结果，远低于 5.94 亿个 CO 和 2.88 亿个 IO，但多于 1660 万个 GG 和 580 万个 VC。
Facebook、谷歌、优步和微软都在 .ai 扩展名中拥有自己的名字，并使用它重定向到相关的人工智能内容。Amazon 在 .ai 中也拥有他们的名字，但只是将其转发到他们的主站点。
Open.ai将用户带到一个站点以使用人工智能生成图像——这很有趣，请尝试一下。
.ai 扩展名中一些有趣的开发网站包括autonomous.ai、cohere.ai、clarity.ai、HomeBot.ai、shield.ai、typecast、copymatic和DeepLearning.ai。
NamePros 讨论
@Jim Holleran最近启动了.ai 的 NamePros 讨论线程。
我还没有亲自投资过 .ai 域名。我特别欢迎投资 .ai 的 NamePros 成员提出意见。
更新： 2023 年 2 月 17 日。我添加了一句话，表明需要两年的注册期限。
The .AI Domain Extension: Sales, Pricing, Auctions, Use
With so much interest in artificial intelligence of late, it was suggested by a NamePros member that I should take a look at the .ai domain extension.
While it is almost certainly true that .com is the dominant extension for large, established artificial intelligence companies, .ai has found traction too, particularly among some AI startups.
By the way, in case you missed it, the AI.com domain name recently started redirecting to OpenAI ChatGPT. The sale of the domain name took place in 2021, with Saw acting as the broker, and OpenAI were the buyer.
What is .AI?
The .ai extension is the country code for Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory located in the Caribbean. Anguilla is located near and to the east of Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands.
The population of Anguilla is less than 20,000, and the total land area is only about 91 square kilometres. With incredible natural beauty, the most important industry is tourism, along with offshore incorporation and banking services.
While most interest is in second level domain names with the .ai extension, it is also possible to buy at the third level, with off.ai, com.ai, net.ai, and org.ai available.
Not Cheap To Register
While the .ai extension is not restricted, and anyone can register for use in any sector, it is not inexpensive. TLD-List shows that annual registration and renewals start at about $65 per year, and are considerably more at many registrars. The registry insists on two year registration periods as well.
Almost No Abuse
While high costs deter some investors, a benefit is that high-cost TLDs usually have very low levels of abuse, and that is true for .ai. SPAMHAUS show just 0.3% of active domains are ‘bad’, with a superb badness score of 0.01, with little spam or other abuse.
The Big .AI Sales
Listed below are the .ai extension sales of $25,000 or more recorded in NameBio, along with the year of the sale.
- expert.ai, $107,495, 2020
- music.ai, $101,500, 2018
- arena.ai, $65,098, 2022
- samur.ai, $50,000, 2021
- analytics.ai, $50,000, 2019
- personal.ai, $48,636, 2021
- growth.ai, $45,000, 2021
- human.ai, $45,000, 2017
- workflow.ai, $35,000, 2023
- ledger.ai, $33,333, 2022
- predictive.ai, $30,050, 2022
- board.ai, $29,522, 2021
- conv.ai, $28,000, 2021
- face.ai, $26,916, 2022
- gene.ai, $25,553, 2022
- wow.ai, $25,050, 2022
- avatar.ai, $25,000, 2022
- content.ai, $25,000, 2019
The list shows that almost all elite level sales in .ai are single-word domain names.
Most of the noteworthy retail sales are from the last few years. Somewhat surprisingly, though, if we look at total sales volume, 2022 saw a dip from the previous three years according to my start of year analysis.
Here is a link to all NameBio-listed .ai extension sales of $1000 and up.
Characteristics of $1000+ .AI Sales
At time of writing, NameBio had, over all time periods, 6089 .ai sales in total ($100+), with 1107 at $1000 and up, and 61 above $10,000.
I took a look at the $1000 and up sales from the last 3 years only. There were 662 sales totalling $2.5 million in dollar volume. You can see the list at this NameBio link. I observed the following:
- Most were single English word names.
- While some were tech terms, more were common words.
- Only 3 included numbers, and none had a hyphen.
- Almost 75% of sales were names 4 to 8 characters in length, see graph below.
- There were 15 animals among the sales, including eagle, elephant, orca, gorilla, coyote, monkey, duck, and penguin.
Sales Price Distribution
For names that sold for $1000 and more over the past three years, I looked at the price distribution. Results below, based on NameBio reported sales, indicate that the majority of .ai names sell for less than $3000, although some sell at higher prices. 48.2% of the sales were in the range $1000 to $1999.
What About Sell-Through Rate?
According to Dofo Advanced Search, on Feb. 8, 2023 there were 15,253 .ai domain names listed for sale at a marketplace included in Dofo. NameBio shows 317 .ai sales during the past 12 months when one includes sales of $500 and above. Combining the data, suggests an apparent sell-through rate of 2.1%.
If one looks at all sales $100 and up, there were 846 .ai sales on NameBio during the past twelve months, suggesting an apparent sell-through rate of 5.6%.
These sell-through rates are substantially higher than for most other extensions, that have apparent sell-through rates of 1% and less. Keep in mind that unreported sales would increase these rates.
However, the high holding cost must be taken into account. If one multiplies the 5.6% STR times the average price of $1230, one obtains $68, similar to the holding cost.
I used the Dofo number for sale, and the sales dollar volume from the most recent 12 months according to NameBio, to compute a current DVPL, Dollar Volume Per Listing. DVPL came out as about $68 for the most recent 12 months, impressive until one remembers that the renewal cost is about that as well. The industry wide apparent DVPL is about $7.25. Keep in mind that NameBio don’t report the majority of retail sales, so the true value of the DVPL will be more.
How Are Domainers Pricing .AI Domain Names?
I used Dofo Advanced Search to see how domainers are pricing their .ai domain names, obtaining the results below.
The distribution is surprising, in that 45.9% were priced between $25,000 and $29,999. Whether that is because one, or a few, investors hold many of the .ai names and price in that range, or just happened across many investors, I have not seen such a concentration in other extensions I examined.
The highest asking price is $10 million, shared by a few names. Interestingly, the name of the Canadian Prime Minister, JustinTrudeau is one of those names.
There are 43 .ai names priced at $1 million or more.
The Monthly AI Auctions
The .ai extension does not send domain names to be auctioned to the usual expired auction marketplaces, or Park.io. Rather, starting in fall 2018, the .ai registry performs a monthly auction of expired .ai names itself. The auction site is auctions.whois.ai.
It is free to create an account at auctions.whois.ai, but you will need to place a deposit to bid on domain names. Here is information on the auction process. Also read the AI Auction FAQs.
- The minimum deposit is $100. There are procedures for getting deposits back, but they involve delays and charges.
- The auctions start on the fourth Friday of each month at noon Anguilla time. Anguilla is 1 hour ahead of Eastern Time Zone.
- Unless you are considered a trusted bidder, having bid and paid for auctioned names over the preceding 6 months, you also need to have on deposit at least 25% the amount that your are bidding.
- The bidding period is 10 days. If there is a bid at the end, it extends the auction by one hour.
- The minimum starting bid is $120.
- The investor bids a maximum amount, and the system automatically applies a bid $10 higher than the previous high bid. For example, if you bid $250, the highest other bidder is $160, it will bid $170 on your behalf, and then bid again if a new bid tops your bid.
- You have a period of 2 weeks to complete payment after the auction finishes. If the person winning an auction does not pay, their account balance forfeits $100. The domain name is placed in the next month’s auction.
- After you win a domain in the .ai auction, and pay for it, you transfer it to the registrar of your choice.
- They have licensed the software used by Park.io, so if you are familiar with auctions there, it will look familiar.
- Names that receive no bids will expire and be released one day after the normal auction closing.
NameBio report .ai auction results, so one day each month there are a lot of .ai sales reported. Because of late bidding, a few sales get reported on the following day.
I suspect it is likely that while most bidders are domain investors, there are also some end users bidding in the .ai auctions as well. The highest auction at Whois.AI was $65,098 for arena.ai in September 2022.
AI Extension Use
A simple indicator of the use of an extension is to see how many results a Google search on site:.ai brings up. For AI there are 39.9 million results, much less than the 594 million CO and 288 million IO, but more than the 16.6 million GG and 5.8 million VC.
Facebook, Google, Uber and Microsoft all own their name in the .ai extension, and use it in redirection to relevant artificial intelligence content. Amazon owns their name in .ai as well, but just forwards it to their main site.
Open.ai takes the user to a site to generate images using artificial intelligence – it is fun, try it out.
A few interesting developed sites on the .ai extension include autonomous.ai, cohere.ai, clarity.ai, HomeBot.ai, shield.ai, typecast, copymatic, and DeepLearning.ai.
NamePros Discussion
@Jim Holleran recently started a NamePros discussion thread for .ai.
I have not personally invested in .ai domain names yet. I particularly welcome comments from NamePros members who have invested in .ai.
Update: Feb. 17, 2023. I added a sentence indicating the required two year registration period.