OpenAI spent $10M on chat.com URL | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI spent $10M on chat.com URL

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46 pointssegasaturn30 comments

Someone educated me on this type of thing a while back. Chat.com - and other highly reusable URLs - is a non-deteriorating asset that has a value on OpenAI's ledger somewhere. It's not like they bought $10,000,000 worth of catering or fuel or labor even buildings. Because someday, the owning entity can sell it for about what they spent on it. And I imagine there is some kind of financial instrument to take out a loan with the domain as collateral. My point is, it's not really like they "spent" the money as much as they just parked it in a domain name.

They definitely bought it.

Though you are correct it is a durable asset. (As are buildings.)

That it keeps its value is a huge assumption.

GP said highly reusable URLs. Roughly by definition, it's enduringly desirable. It is valuable in a way that say, Kmart dot com is not, since it has an open-ended set of uses. I chose the Kmart example because that domain is associated with a specific brand that's universally known to be irrelevant, which caps its value to whatever cash one could make "redirect to affiliate links" generate with random legacy traffic it gets. You wouldn't use it for a dating site, or even for a grocery delivery startup.

A 'temporarily reusable' tier might be something like "DVD dot com" or "rtx dot com" or something -- presumably there's a lot less money in DVD than there was 20 years ago, and presumably raytracing won't be an exciting high-end thing people are excited about 20 years from now. They're valuable and quite reusable at one point, but could become low-value by the time the company decides to unload them.

I'd say any single syllable common english word .com url has a high intrinsic value that will not go down unless english stops being the de facto lingua franca of the internet.

A four letter doc com that has become the verb for AI.

Not that huge.

Four letter English word, .com tld, it will certainly hold its value.

Is it really "owned"? Couldn't ICANN change the rules around ownership which would decrease its value?

That will throw a nuclear bomb on the whole .com. Things are already not that good with the US being able to seize .com. I don't think ICANN pulling something off will make it better.

I think they can't just sell that domain anymore, without allowing some scam to take it over. It's associated with their brand now.

Correction for the title:

They spent more than $15.5 million, according to the article

I do wonder what the RoI is here

15M is like one month of salaries for 500 engineers, so like 40% of their whole eng. team

In Q3 2024 Google spent $7.2B on "Sales & Marketing Expenses". The data is not broken down more granularly. If 50% of that is pure "Marketing Expense" then you'll see that the scale of the market these players are competing for is worth $3.5B PER QUARTER in operating expenses to attract customers.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204424...

If you add a $15M one time capital expense to this then it doesn't even appear as a rounding error on this cash flow statement.

Acquiring a long term asset acting as a pillar of your marketing strategy then it begins to look like a very good deal.

Sure, you can have very sound theory to justify that

But how do we measure it? How can we tell that it was successful / good idea or not?

Even things like what is the difference between "chat.com" and "chat.ai"?

Would "chat.ai" for 1M be more efficient than "chat.com" for 15M?

Not to dispute the main point you are making, but that's assuming 360K salary. OpenAI engineers make significantly more than that.

Based. I hope they plaster this on billboards everywhere. Bring back the dotcom. I'm tired of seeing people advertise names and then hearing them whine that someone else advertises for the name on Google or that people search the app store and find some kind of wrapper.

Dotcom is really expensive. It prices out entrepreneurs who aren’t independently wealthy or take on usurious venture capital terms.

On X it was mentioned that the seller received part of the compensation in OpenAI stock.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42067474

This domain was purchased by Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot’s cofounder and CTO) for 8 million a couple of months ago.

Naming rights for a stadium up next surely?

Yeah what did they do with that FTX stadium? :D

Could I get 1% as much for snugchat.com? Tempting, but I think I'd still rather build it out; especially now.

definitely more than that

shades of .com bubble

"Chat (formerly ChatGPT)"

Deprecating ChatGPT as a brand would be the stupidest marketing decision since New Coke.

Yes, but not for the same reason. IMHO the stupid part would be because they can't get a trademark on a completely generic term, so 1000 competitors and knockoffs would be diluting their brand equity and SEO.

Wait until you found out about X

New Coke was actually a terrific marketing decision. Before New Coke, Pepsi was about to take over. New Coke made people realize how much they loved the old coke.

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