Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

"This is the best domain name on the planet." - Musk said of x.com. In 2017, he spent $5 million to repurchase x.com from PayPal. Later, the social media platform he bought, Twitter, was renamed X.

Seven years later, with the rise of the AI ​​​​wave, the battle for domain names has heated up again, and the amount of money has increased even more: an AI start-up company called Friend spent 1.8 million US dollars for friend.com. OpenAI paid more than 15 million US dollars for chat.com...the cumulative investment has exceeded hundreds of millions of yuan.

These AI companies, which are claiming that AI will eventually kill all outdated websites and apps, are spending huge sums of money to grab website domain names. These companies are "physically honest". Even in the new battlefield of artificial intelligence, a good domain name is still priceless.

chat.com: From "search" to "chat"

Recently, OpenAI bought chat.com for a sky-high price of US$15.5 million. This investment may seem incredible at first glance. After all, today’s young people are more accustomed to opening apps instead of typing in URLs letter by letter in the browser.

Behind OpenAI’s investment in domain names, it reflects a battle for search access. In the past two decades, "Google it" and "Baidu it" have almost become synonymous with search. Now, with the rise of generative AI, people have become accustomed to "chatting" to find answers. From this perspective, OpenAI’s acquisition of chat.com is, to some extent, playing a bigger game: making “chat” the “google” of the new era.

In the field of generative AI, "chat" has become an important keyword. ChatGPT can be accessed by typing chat.com directly into the browser. This simple and direct experience is crucial for quickly expanding the user base.

In addition, many users will mistakenly write "ChatGPT" as "ChatGTP". This may seem like a small typo, but it can cause traffic to go to other competitors. For example, when the user incorrectly enters "ChatGTP", the page will redirect to NinjaChat AI, which is undoubtedly not the result OpenAI wants to see.

From this perspective, investing in chat.com is not just for an easy-to-remember domain name, but also a defensive strategy. By providing a simple domain name that does not require memorizing complex letter combinations, OpenAI hopes to lower the threshold for users and avoid potential traffic losses..

Interestingly, the seller of chat.com is HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah. It is rumored that he not only received cash in the transaction, but also received a share of OpenAI. Becoming a shareholder of OpenAI may be more imaginative than holding a domain name. Shah himself is not involved in major domain name transactions. He purchased connect.com for US$10 million in 2022. The word game website WordPlay.com he developed also accumulated 16 million users in a short period of time with its intuitive domain name. He clearly has a unique understanding of the value of premium domain names.

Who owns ai.com?

Before chat.com, there was a more confusing story: the mystery of ai.com’s ownership. This domain name has belonged to Google since the mid-1990s, and according to some media reports, OpenAI acquired it for $11 million in 2023. However, this rumor has not yet been officially confirmed by either party.

According to information from domain name broker Saw.com, ai.com was owned by the Internet development company Future Media Architects (FMA) in 2021. While there were hints that the new buyer might be OpenAI, this information has never been confirmed. Currently, the domain name is under privacy protection, adding a bit of mystery.

What’s more interesting is that ai.com’s analysis target is like playing hide and seek: it first pointed to ChatGPT, then jumped to Musk’s xAI, and even pointed to technology YouTuber Marques Brownlee for a period of time An AI video from (MKBHD). Now it is pointed to ChatGPT again. This erratic jump makes people wonder: Could it be that the domain name holder is playing a "play hard to get" marketing game?

However, according to the personalities of Musk and Altman, if one of them really bought ai.com, I am afraid it would have been shown off on the X platform. After all, Musk spent ten years and US$11 million on tesla.com, and also spent US$5 million on x.com. Ultraman also immediately announced his "sovereignty" over chat.com on x.

.ai: Windfall for small countries

Hoarding "vanity" The phenomenon of "domain name" is as old as the history of the Internet. When money was being burned in the field of AI, there was a winner who silently counted his money and smiled: Anguilla. This Caribbean island has a population of only 15,000This small island (less than one-fifth of the size of a bird's nest), because it holds the country-specific domain name suffix .ai, is enjoying AI dividends:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) ) When allocating country code top-level domain names, ".ai" was assigned to Anguilla based on international standards. This allocation is done according to the country code determined by the ISO 3166 standard, and Anguilla's code happens to be "AI".

For every .ai domain name registered and renewed, Anguilla will receive US$140. With the rise of AI entrepreneurship, according to WHOIS data, as of June 2023, the total number of .ai domain names has reached 248,609, almost double that of July 2022. The small country’s domain name revenue has soared from US$1 million in 2017 to US$32 million in 2023, accounting for more than 10% of its GDP. In 2023 alone, revenue from domain name registration fees reached one-fifth of the country’s total government revenue.

From Copy.ai to Character.ai, from Jasper.ai to Perplexity.ai, more and more AI startups choose .ai as their digital identity. It can be said that an accidental domain name suffix allowed this small island, which was originally mainly engaged in tourism and offshore banking, to ride on the express train of the technological revolution. It is predicted that Anguilla's GDP growth is expected to reach 6.95% in 2024, largely due to the continued rise in demand for .ai domain names.

Domain name layout of China's large model companies: I also have Plan B

< p>While OpenAI is spending a lot of money on domain names, domestic AI companies are trying to save the country. What should I do if I can’t get the .com domain name? The answer is: Register as many domain names as there are alternatives. If it doesn't work, continue fighting in another direction.

The official website of The Dark Side of the Moon is moonshot.cn, and typing moonshot.com will jump to johnsculley.com/lander. The owner of this website is John Sculley, who was used by Steve Jobs as "you". Do you want to sell sweet sodas for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world with me?" The legend who came to join Apple and later drove Steve Jobs away, and John Sculley wrote a book about corporate innovation called "Moonshot!", so everything was connected.

But for Dark Side of the Moon, kimi is obviously more important than moonshot. kimi.com, kimi.ai, kimi.cn, kimi.com.cn, kimi.today, kimi.zone, kimi.team, this seriesAll the domain names are in the hands of Yue Dark, and if you focus on collecting Pokémon, you have to collect the entire set.

In addition, through whois reverse checking, we found that Yue Dark also registered xiaoke.chat, xiaoke.run, and xiaoke.team. Is this another smart assistant product (Xiaoke) or an AI+CRM product (Shangke)?

Zhipu AI’s domain name is mainly practical. Are zhipu.com and zhipu.cn both used? It’s okay, zhipuai.cn can also be used. In addition to the products that have been launched, Zhipu has also registered a series of domain names related to large model evaluation (llmbench.cn, llmbenchmark.cnllm-bench.cn), as well as personal tax.online, aiworkflow.cn and other domain names.

What’s funny is that Zhipu’s large model open platform uses bigmodel.cn, and even shouted the slogan of using big model API to access bigmodel.cn, while bigmoxing.cn and guochanapi.cn are two However, a domain name has gone into the hands of Stepping Stars, and they are competing to see whose domain name is more Chinese-style, right?

The situation on the official website of Minimax is similar: you may want to register minimax.com, but after checking, you find out that the domain name belongs to an old German firefighting company. So they chose to take a detour and used minimaxi.com (with an extra i). Another interesting thing is that Minimax has registered three domain names: belloai.cn, bello-ai.cn, and aibello.cn, and belloai.com is the official website of Bello, a company founded in 2016 that focuses on AI technology research and development in recruitment scenarios. Startup company.

In general, judging from these cases, the attitude of domestic AI companies towards domain names is basically one sentence: Didn’t get the domain name you wanted? Don’t panic, we have a hundred Plan Bs. Others have chat.com and ai.com, but we at .cn are still making large models very popular.

So, why buy a domain name?

In an era when APP is king, why do AI companies still spend so much money buying domain names? The answer to this question may be more complicated than we imagine, but its core values: brand recognition and user trust will always remain unchanged, and a good domain name will still be an important part of the company's strategic layout.

However, for most startups, cost performance may be a more important consideration. After all, in this era where user experience is king, product strength is the real magic weapon for winning. A sky-high price domain name is certainly eye-catching, but in the end, real products and services must speak for themselves.

For example, perplexity.ai can be used even by native English speakers.It is often difficult to remember or misspell the name, let alone other users around the world, but as an AI search engine, the company relies on its product strength to gain the favor of a large number of users.

The answer to what is the best domain name may not be important. The important thing is that no matter how catchy a domain name is, the value must ultimately be proven by products and services that truly solve user problems.

It is worth noting that with the development of technology, the domain name itself may also undergo changes. The popularity of voice interaction, the emergence of new generations of Internet protocols and platform-level devices may change the way we access the Internet. In this sense, today's domain name dispute may become a unique footnote in the history of Internet development.