London, 11 May. On May 10th at 3pm BST .ART, the art world’s exclusive web domain, launched on 7th December 2016, entered its General Availability period (GA), opening the registry to the public.

During the first 24 hours, over 3’000 domain names were purchased. Of those about 95% were standard, e.g., personal names of people and organizations, while the rest belonged to the .ART inventory of names and word combinations. While the personal names are mostly sold at standard prices, starting from $15, the .ART inventory names are valued individually by a proprietary mathematical “big data” algorithm. This totaled over $150’000 amount of sales in first 24 hours.

The most active registrars were: Gandi SAS, Go Daddy, Instra, Tucows and United-domains.

The first name sold in the General Availability was HAPPYART.ART, other sales included:  INVALUABLE.ART, MOLESKINEFOUNDATION.ART and MFA.ART. The most expensive name was MYLOVE.ART worth over $9’000.

.ART closed its Preferred Access Period with over 300 live sites. The starting price has been $300 and there were about 2500 registrations for a total retail volume of sales over $600’000. Nearly half of these were from the .ART inventory. Among them, .ART has also gifted approximately 500 domain names to art school students and not-for-profit cultural institutions.

“We are gratified by the response of renowned arts institutions, as well as participants from variety of creative fields, who have joined with their personal .ART domain names. We have built a strong foundation for the arts community and look forward to welcoming more members” says .ART founder, venture investor Ulvi Kasimov.