First .IO, then .AI. What’s next?

Hello everyone! It seems like it’s been a very long time since my last blog post. Running three active businesses plus a small olive garden as a hobby (but taking too much time) and having a baby girl have been taking my time I guess. Today (23rd of April) is an important day (and a day off) for Turkey. Happy National Sovereignty and International Children’s Day to whom celebrate. I finally found some time off and wanted to write my opinions about the next big extension.

Most of us know that .IO extension has been on fire since 2019. The extension was there for a long time though. However, during the COVID times, tech companies started to adapt and use the extension and then the number and the volume of the sales are sky rocketed.

Similar story happened with .AI. Right after the launch of ChatGPT, the extension had seen massive amount of interest from AI companies and of course from the domain investors. We’ve been seeing high amount of .AI sales for two years straight. 35-40% of our acquisitions at SecretBrokerage.com were .AI in 2023 and first quarter of 2024 started strong as well. We will probably keep seeing strong sales with .AI extension in the short-mid future. After that, it won’t be a surprise to see a correction like we saw with .IO. So, what’s next?

Before going forward, I have to say that I love .COM and I don’t think any other extension will replace it anytime soon. However, I still like some other extensions. If you read until this point, I’ve been writing about the facts. After this, I’m going to be speculative, meaning, the followings are not investment advice and always do your own diligence and I’m not affiliated with any extensions (other than my love to .COM).

If you’re familiar with X, Telegram, Twitch, Kick, and even some crypto exchange service, you are probably no stranger to their bot services (and bots in exchanges). Some of those services are using .BOT extension such as moo.bot, and there’re other projects (services) using the extension such as farm.bot, hydra.bot and resist.bot. There’re also lots of websites using chat bots to assist their customers.

What I believe is that the number of these bot services will go up in time. I have no doubt about that. The cake will get bigger. However, the interesting thing is “bot” and “ai” has a lot in common. That means, those builders, businesses, projects that are related to bot services have possibility of using .AI and/or .BOT (other than other extensions). And, there are lots of great .BOT domains that are available to register at the moment. Also, the registry of .BOT extension is Amazon and that’s a plus one for me.

On the other side, there are registration tiers for this extension which makes investing expensive. Standart renewal is $50 USD ish and goes up to $3,600 USD. Other tiers I saw are $120, $360, $1,200 and $3,600. There are probably a few tiers between $360, $1,200 and $3,600. But still, there are lots of decent names with $50 reg price. I must note that these are Dynadot registration prices. NameCheap prices are a bit higher.

There are some old/new investors who made considerable investments to .BOT domains already. However, the registration numbers are still too low (As of today, there are only 13,329 registered .BOT domains out there according to https://domainnamestat.com/statistics/tld/bot-TLD_ID-135). They might be too early or the market doesn’t want/need the extension, time will tell.

Long story short, I see a chance for .BOT extension being successful in the future considering the current state of trends and technology. Let’s wait and see.