Artificial intelligence had a significant impact on the domain name industry — in more than one way.

Late last year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Suddenly, a concept that has been talked about for over a decade had a case study.

It's hard not to be wowed by the progress of generative artificial intelligence. ChatGPT kicked off a boom in use cases, from creating images to generating content. And with its API, many companies sprung up to take advantage of the power of AI.

You need not look further than the domain registration business to see this play out. Many AI-powered domain name generators sprung to life this year, and they're pretty darned good. In fact, I sold a domain I found through one of these tools on the aftermarket.

Just about every industry has a use case for AI, and it's transforming how people work.

It's also been a boon to the tiny island of Anguilla. It had the good fortune of being assigned the ISO country code AI. It has profited for years from companies registering .ai domains for their businesses, and this went into overdrive in 2013.

In addition to a rapid increase in registrations, the country is profiting by selling expired domains. It started auctioning these names in 2018. It auctions the domains monthly through a partnership with Dynadot (which bought park.io); this month, it grossed over $400k.

It's not just .ai domains that have seen a lift from the AI boom. This year, chat.com sold for over $10 million-twice! Personally, I sold four AI-related domains on the aftermarket: brainstormAI.com, productivityAI.com, facilityAI.com, and questionAI.com.

As AI has captured the world's attention, another popular technology has taken a dive. Web3 and blockchain suffered a horrible year, including a near cessation of the market for NFTs and many of web3 leaders doing the perp walk. This has reduced attention on blockchain-based domains, as well as domains adopted by the web3 community. .Xyz saw a fall in aftermarket activity compared to a year ago, although sales are still happening.

Unlike web3, AI has actual use cases that have already been implemented. It's here to stay.

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