On the Internet, positioning is vital. Even with a very popular service, having a simple domain with a commonly used word can significantly boost visits to your website. And this is exactly what OpenAI, the popular AI company, must have thought this week when it acquired the domain chat.com.
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Subscribe (it's FREE) ►Sam Altman, CEO of the company, was the one who revealed the acquisition last Wednesday, posting a simple tweet that contained only the link to chat.com, which now automatically redirects to ChatGPT, the popular generative AI-based chatbot from OpenAI. With this purchase, the company intends to strengthen its brand and simplify access to its platform.
Before it became a part of OpenAI, the domain was owned by Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot, who bought it in early 2023 for 15.5 million dollars. Although Shah kept the transaction details secret, he made it clear that he sold the domain for a sum higher than what he himself had paid. “The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I believe chat-based UX (#ChatUX) is the next big thing in software,” explained Shah on LinkedIn a year ago.
In a tweet quoting Altman’s post, Shah also mentioned that OpenAI paid him in company shares instead of cash, something that could highlight the company’s interest in reserving its capital for other projects. This acquisition is just another example of OpenAI’s recent investments, which recently raised $6.6 billion in a funding round.
The purchase of the chat.com domain aligns with other measures the company has taken to renew its image and redefine its brand strategy. In September, the company introduced new reasoning models under the nomenclature “o1,” and its former research director, Bob McGrew, explained at the time that this series would be “the first step towards more sensible names.”
