The high-profile chat.com domain has a new owner and is even fully operational as of yesterday morning. Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. CEO Sam Altman himself informed about it in a short contribution on the X network. Dropping “GPT” from the domain is one of the company’s rebranding efforts.
The buyout cost the company more than $15.5 million
The chat.com domain is one of the oldest on the web, with registrations dating back to 1996. Early last year, Dharmesh Shah, founder and CEO of HubSpot, bought the domain for $15.5 million.
However, the domain “didn’t warm up for a long time” and just a few months later it was sold, to an unknown buyer at the time and without any details of the sale. From his contribution on the X network from this morning, it appears he sold the domain for more than he bought it for. Moreover, OpenAI did not pay him with money, but probably with shares of its own company.
There is still money to be made by buying and selling domains
Collecting interesting domains and then selling them for lucrative sums is almost as old as the Internet itself. Nevertheless, it is possible to earn a lot of money this way even nowadays. According to the website namebio there were more than 145 thousand web domain sales in 2023 with a total sales value of more than $159 million.
The ranking of the most expensive sales was occupied by the above-mentioned domain chat.com for more than 15.5 million dollars, the second place was occupied by the domain help.com with the amount of 3 million dollars and the third place max.com cost the current owner 1.8 million dollars.
Source: www.cnews.cz
