Domain investors are betting on .si. Will businesses, too?
Slovenia’s .si domain name saw unprecedented growth last month.
According to the registry, 46,066 new .si domains were registered in September, and momentum is growing. In the last two days, about 12,000 domains were registered per day.
This comes in the wake of Donald Trump saying the U.S. would refer to artificial intelligence as super intelligence during a speech at the United Nations. The extra surge in the last two days came after he signed an executive order to that effect.
While Trump added fuel to the fire, domain investors were already ahead of this trend.
Super intelligence was already a term, and domain investors have been piling in for months.
What I don’t see evidence of (yet) is adoption by actual companies.
Most aftermarket transactions can be tracked back to domain investors, not businesses. They have been relisted at higher prices.
Leanne Mac, who tracks ProductHunt launch domains, shows no startups launching with .si in the past 30 days. Fifty of today’s launches used a .ai domain. None chose .si.
This is despite the relative affordability of .si domains. The registry charges €10 per year. .AI, which is the country code for Anguilla, charges $160 wholesale for a minimum two-year registration.
None of this is to say that end users won’t adopt .si. It’s just that there’s little evidence of it so far.
Reminds of when Rick Schwartz and flowers.mobi. A fading cult leader is not going to change AI into SI.