[joegibbs]

I don't think that domains are worth nearly as much as they were 15-25 years ago. Back at the start of the web a lot of people would go to sites by typing in the URL directly, which made it worth something to have the perfect domain for your business sector - people heard the name of the brand and went to [whatever].com. Since search engines took off, most people would go to Google first and then type in the brand. Also, most .com domains got taken off the market, and people started to realise that you don't need a perfect domain, it can be a bit off. Valve's Steam is the biggest PC game store in the world, and it's still on store.steampowered.com, not steam.com. Now, domains are more like vanity licence plates or NFTs.

The most expensive domain sale was CarInsurance.com for about $50m, and that was back in 2010, even though the tech sector has grown so much since then.

Maybe in the future they'll make a comeback with how much worse Google has been getting - who knows?

[x3sphere]

I agree it’s not as important. There have still been some rather high .com sales though… Ai.com sold for 11M recently. Now personally, I have never accessed ChatGPT through that domain and never seen it even linked from that.

[satvikpendem]

Even ChatGPT's domain for quite a while used to be chat.openai.com, which only recently redirects to chatgpt.com.

[cortesoft]

I feel like the rise of advertising malware attacks (where someone places a google ad on a domain name they don’t own, so that people searching for that site directly are tricked into clicking on the malware ad instead) is bringing back typing domains directly. I know I have personally started avoiding using google search as my dns.

[p0w3n3d]

People indeed are using search engines (i.e. Google) to navigate to domains (I saw even people who entered the fqdn into Google only to see it as the third/fourth link after the ads) however as Google indeed is the ruler of souls (I saw also people not finding the domain in the links, despite having it entered into google) I dare say whole world business depends on search engines (i.e. google) and this must stop.