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ai.com, the most-expensive domain sale ever
The domain name story that has it all? A record-setting sales price. A launch commercial during the US Super Bowl broadcast. A category-killer string reflecting the world’s hottest technology. It ticks a lot of boxes.
The domain ai.com sold almost a year ago for $70 million, according to Financial Times and the brokers, who negotiated the deal, beating the $30 million voice.com record set in 2019.
The seller was Arsyan Ismail, whose initials are AI, and the buyer was Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency exchange. The sell-side broker was Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.
The $70 million was reportedly paid in cryptocurrency rather than cash. Crypto-sceptics may worry whether this makes apples-to-apples comparisons with previous big sales appropriate.
Marszalek’s plan for the domain is to allow users to create autonomous AI agents that, rather just respond to chat prompts and instructions, are actually taken off-leash to perform tasks on behalf of their creators without waiting for permission.
The service was unveiled in an Super Bowl ad on Sunday, in a 30-second spot that encouraged viewers to create their usernames on on the currently pretty bare-bones ai.com web site.
The ad, which would have cost in the ball park of $8 million, was reportedly the most-successful of this year’s broadcast and caused the web site to crash under the weight of viewer curiosity.
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