Unlike new TLD launches, there was no one-year junk drop. But many domains are coming up for renewal.
Last week, domain registrar Dynadot announced a new auction category to help people sell domains they don’t plan to renew. It’s starting with .ai domain names.
This is a smart move. .Ai domains are expensive. If a Dynadot customer lets one expire, it will either be auctioned off through the .ai registry’s partnership with Namecheap or fully expire and could land at another registrar.
By offering pre-expiration auctions for .ai domains currently listed at Dynadot, the company seeks to capture renewal revenue and even a bit of upside from reselling the domain (Dynadot charges a 15% commission).
Dynadot plans to allow other ccTLDs in the future.
So why start with .ai? There are two reasons this makes sense.
First, .ai is very expensive. The wholesale cost is $80 per year, with a two-year minimum for registrations and renewals. Losing a registration forfeits a lot of money compared to other TLDs.
Second, we are approaching a continuous “junk drop” phase for .ai.
A junk drop refers to the phase that usually happens on the first anniversary of a top level domain launch. People who registered domains early on decide to let them expire, and since many domains were registered at once, the registry experiences a notable number of expirations.
.Ai has existed for a long time, but has only become popular in the past few years. It doesn’t have a launch date junk drop, but it does have a growing number of domains coming up for renewal.
Domain investors will be extra judicious when deciding which domains to keep before paying another $160+ to renew them.
As of October 1, 2024, there were 533,068 registered .ai domains. That was up 54,372 from July 1, 2025. Those domains hit their first renewal cycle starting next month.
It continued to grow quickly from there. From October 1 to November 27, .ai added another 50,507 names. It grew to about 600,000 domains as of the end of 2024, and has roughly doubled since then. (Identity Digital took over management of the TLD in early 2025 and stopped providing frequently updated domain statistics.)
The point is, many domains are expiring going forward. And many of these aren’t of the highest quality because they were registered later, after the best domains had already been taken.
Dynadot is smart to try to save some of its existing registrations. It also gives domain investors an incentive to register domains at Dynadot if they can profit from the domains they let go of, rather than all the money going to the auction platforms.
(Dynadot might also be a bit peeved that it used to run the .ai expiry auctions before the registry handed that business to Namecheap.)
Domain investors know that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Their domains are sometimes registered when they let domains expire. There’s even a new service dedicated to helping investors cash out of domains they plan to drop.
It will be interesting to see what happens to .ai domains as a growing number of domains come up for renewal. The good news for Anguilla is that .ai doesn’t seem to be losing steam. Still, many domain investors will let some of their domains go rather than pay for an expensive two-year renewal.
The pre-expiry auction angle makes sense for Dynadot, but it also creates a new challenge for buyers on the other side. Someone picking up a dropped .ai domain at auction is paying a premium for what looks like a brandable AI name, often without knowing what that domain was actually used for. A startup pivot that involved phishing or spam infrastructure, a product that got flagged by security vendors, a trademark registered under the same term months before the drop. At $160+ for a two-year renewal commitment, running a reputation check before bidding seems like the bare minimum. That’s the gap dom-verify.com was built for.