Two-letter domain auction raises half a billion (dong)

Vietnam’s domain registry reportedly raised VND 557 million selling 31 two-character .vn domains at auction late last month.

That works out to about an average of about $685 per successfully sold domain, not a lot for a two-character name even in a relatively unknown (in the west) ccTLD.

The auction was led by ok.vn, which went for the dong equivalent of $4,170. Other sales included hi.vn ($2,281), mb.vn ($1,445), f5.vn for ($1,365), 3m.vn ($836) and 5s.vn ($684), according to Viet Nam News.

It was the second batch of names to be auctioned by VNNIC, following a round in March that was led by the sale of mb.vn for over $60,000.

Ask.com hits the market as Jeeves breathes his last

Some are saying it could be one of the most expensive domain sales ever.

The killer name ask.com is currently for sale, after InterActiveCorp closed down Ask Jeeves, the once-pioneering search engine, at the start of May.

According to broker Andrew Miller of ATM Holdings, he’s partnered with fellow broker Larry Fischer to market the domain, which he said is “one of the most valuable domains ever to come to market”.

For 20 years, the domain was used as the successor to askjeeves.com, the original character-based natural-language search engine that, with hindsight, looks in many ways like a conceptual precursor to AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

Ask Jeeves was one of the many search engines to come out of the mid-to-late 1990s to have their breakfast, lunch and dinner voraciously consumed by Google in the noughties. It plodded on regardless, before closing down for good two weeks ago.

ATM Holdings has brokered some of the biggest category-killer .com sales of all time, including club.com, which sold last month for $10 million. Fischer of GetYourDomain helped ai.com sell a year ago for $70 million.

Correction: this article was corrected May 16 to reflect the fact that ai.com was brokered by GetYourDomain.

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.

love.you sold in apparent five-figure deal

The domain name love.you has been sold by Amazon Registry for what was probably more than $30,000, during what so far has been a bit of a disappointing launch for the .you gTLD.

love.you is the only domain currently showing up in .you’s zone file that has a creation date after 1300 UTC on September 25, the moment Amazon opened its latest Early Access Periods.

It was registered about half an hour after the EAP opened last Thursday.

The first-day EAP application fee was $10,000. If love.you was listed as a top-tier premium domain, which seems likely, that would have added an extra $20,000 to the sale price, and that’s before registrar 101domain applied its retail markup.

It’s the only EAP registration in .you so far, judging by the zone. Amazon is currently also running EAPs for .talk and .fast, but zone files suggest it hasn’t made any sales in those gTLDs yet.

The three TLDs are having unusually long EAPs — 11 days versus the usual five — with wholesale prices ranging from $10,000 on day one to $100 on day 11, before premium fees are applied.

Full general availability at standard pricing will begin October 6, with prices likely to be about $20 to $30 a year.

eBay slogan domain no longer has a BIN price

Looks like domain investor TopDomains is a DI reader.

The domain people.love, which would be needed if eBay wanted to make its new Things.People.Love slogan a functioning call-to-action, no longer has a buy-it-now option, a few days after I first wrote about it.

It had been listed with a $75,000 BIN price, along with a lease-to-own option. Now, the only option appears to be a brokered deal.

The owner of the domain seems to have also wildcarded the third level, so the domain things.people.love actually resolves to the sales lander. It did not resolve at all on Monday.

TV network rebrands on single-letter domain

UKTV, the company that runs a number of basic cable TV stations in the UK, has rebranded itself as U, and is now using u.co.uk as its primary destination domain.

Its channels have been rebranded to the domain-resistant U&Dave, U&W, U&DRAMA and U&YESTERDAY. The “masterbrand” U will be used for its streaming services.

The domain u.co.uk was released back in 2011 as part of Nominet’s release of one and two-character domains. It was claimed as a trademark by multiple parties and was auctioned for a likely four-figure sum.

The winning bidder in 2011, Ubrands, doesn’t seem to have ever used the domain, and it’s not clear how much U paid for it this time it changed hands.

The matching second-level, u.uk, is owned by a domain investment company and has a BIN price of £500,000 on its landing page.

Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction

The Government of Anguilla has put its latest batch of expired .ai domains up for auction, including a handful of single-word names and a great many three-character strings. There are 1,878 domains on the list.

At least two of the domains being auctioned off were reported sold earlier this month at the last .ai expired names auction — insure.ai, which fetched a winning bid of $24,700, and dog.ai, which reached $21,311.

They were the third and fourth most-expensive domains in the earlier auction. The domains’ Whois show the registry is still the current registrant, so the winning bidder(s) presumably didn’t pay up.

Other English dictionary-word domains that caught my eye include technological.ai, bucharest.ai, fulfilled.ai, annotated.ai, sponsorship.ai, forged.ai, crowded.ai, springboard.ai and queer.ai.

The list is notable for the number of times the word “meta” appears — well over 100 times. This is presumably due to these three facts: 1) .ai has a two-year minimum registration term, 2) it takes 90 days for expired names to make it to auction, and 3) Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in October 2021.

For any masochists among you, some obvious cybersquats are also listed for sale, including facebookmeta.ai, facebookmetaverse.ai and facebook-metaverse.ai. Remember, .ai uses the UDRP too.

The auction ends February 5.

Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack

A single-letter domain, an AI-related name, and a category-killer domain hack appear to have been sold by Google Registry during the latest week of its ongoing Early Access Period for the new .ing gTLD.

Judging by the .ing zone file, at least three domains have been registered in .ing since I last posted about the apparent seven-figure sale of host.ing a couple weeks ago.

The new names are w.ing, shipp.ing and tur.ing. I assume tur.ing refers to war hero Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing and namesake of the Turing Test, used to judge AI intelligence.

w.ing was registered first, on November 13, when it would have incurred a six-figure price tag, according to published registrar retail prices. The registrant is listed as Google via the registrar Markmonitor.

Unlike w.ing and host.ing, the other two were registered via GoDaddy (albeit with redacted registrant names) so we can be more confident they are actually sales to third-party registrants.

Both shipp.ing and tur.ing were registered shortly after Google’s EAP rolled over into week three pricing ($35,000 at 101Domain‘s low-end prices, as a guide) on November 21 at 1600 UTC.

If Whois can be relied upon, the shipp.ing registrant is based in Texas and the tur.ing registrant in Arizona.

tur.ing is the only one trying to resolve currently, from where I’m sitting, but it fails due to a cert error.

Google’s EAP enters week four tomorrow at 1600 UTC, at which point prices fall daily until they settle at general availability pricing on December 5.

Did somebody spend a million bucks on a Google domain hack?

There’s evidence that Google Registry may have sold a .ing domain name for seven figures during its pre-launch period.

Google is well into its Early Access Period for the new gTLD, which runs for five weeks with premium prices decreasing every week or day until December 5, when they go to general availability pricing.

The EAP was notable for just how premium the first-week prices were — if you really wanted a quality domain hack for your business, it would cost you well north of $1 million.

But as far as I can tell from zone files, just one domain was added during that first week — host.ing, which has a Whois creation date of November 6, well within the cut-off for the seven-figure price tag.

The domain does not resolve and Whois currently shows Google itself as the registrant and Google’s go-to registrar, Markmonitor, as the registrar.

So it may be a self-reg, but waiting until EAP to grab a name in-house when Google has had literally years to do so does seem unusual.

Belgian MP registers Hamas domain, redirects to IDF

A member of the Belgian parliament has reportedly registered hamas.be and redirected it to the Israeli Defense Forces’ web site.

Michael Freilich, the country’s only Jewish MP, bought the domain after seeing it was available and to keep it out of the hands of Hamas supporters, according to The Jerusalem Post.

He also reportedly caused the deletion of a payment processing account linked to Hamas.

His actions follow the massacre of Israelis and others by Hamas terrorists October 7, which kicked off a conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives on both sides.