Eric Lyon
Scorpion Agency LLCTop Member
- Impact
- 34,153
Today, i'll be analyzing the .moi gTLD to see if I can dig up any helpful data points that could be stacked with someone elses research into the ,oi extension.
Source
Source
Note: At the time of this analysis there was a 1-character minimum to register a .moi gTLD. A 1-character .moi ranges from a mid to high-3-figure premium registration cost.
With the above in mind, lets dive right in...
.moi domain registration costs
According to Tldes.com the .moi domain registration cost ranges from $20.20 to $36.12+..moi domains registered today
According to DNS.Coffee there are 898 .moi domains registered today.Public .moi domain sales reports
It's hard to find any .moi domain sales reports online.Note: NameBio.com shows "0" .moi domain sales reports.
5-year .moi domain growth summary
Based on the tracking data from DNS.Coffee, the .moi gTLD has experienced a total 5-year growth of 232.6%, expanding from 270 registrations in August 2021 to 898 registrations in August 2026. The trajectory of the extension reveals two distinct phases: a period of mild contraction followed by a rapid, accelerating surge in adoption starting in late 2023.
- 2021–2023: Stagnation and Minor Contraction
- Aug 2021: 270 domains
- Aug 2022: 237 domains (-33 domains / -12.2%)
- Aug 2023: 233 domains (-4 domains / -1.7%)
- Context: In its early years under Amazon's management, the extension struggled to find momentum. High baseline premium costs and a lack of marketing push led to a net loss of domains as initial promotional registrations quietly expired.
- 2023–2026: Rapid Acceleration Phase
- Aug 2024: 380 domains (+147 domains / +63.1%)
- Aug 2025: 564 domains (+184 domains / +48.4%)
- Aug 2026: 898 domains (+334 domains / +59.2%)
- Context: The extension entered its strongest growth cycle yet over the last three years. The massive leap between 2025 and 2026 alone added 334 new registrations, representing the single largest net addition in the extension’s 5-year history.
- Retail Registrar Integration: As third-party retail registrars streamlined how users link Amazon-operated registries to traditional hosting platforms, buying friction dropped considerably.
- The French Personal Branding Trend: The linguistic advantage of .moi (meaning "me" in French) has gained visual traction for micro-influencers, personal portfolios, and link-in-bio landing pages as mainstream alternatives like .me face heavy oversaturation.
8 niches for .moi domains
1. French Personal Branding & PortfoliosBecause "moi" means "me" in French, this is the single strongest market for the extension. It serves as an elegant, high-impact alternative to .me for francophone freelancers, creators, and professionals.
- Target Users: French, Canadian, and Belgian graphic designers, copywriters, and consultants.
As creators migrate away from generic, unbranded platforms like Linktree, they are seeking short, self-referential vanity URLs to house their social media links.
- Target Users: Instagrammers, TikTokers, and YouTubers building a centralized hub.
The wellness and self-care industry focuses heavily on the self ("moi-même"). This makes the gTLD highly marketable for content spaces dedicated to mental health, solo travel, and personal growth.
- Target Users: Solo travel bloggers, fitness coaches, and meditation instructors.
In fashion, particularly luxury French fashion, "Moi" evokes a sense of personal identity, tailored elegance, and self-expression.
- Target Users: Independent fashion designers, custom tailors, and boutique fragrance houses.
Job seekers looking to stand out to recruiters can use the extension to create a digital CV that emphasizes their individual profile.
- Target Users: Tech professionals, executives, and career coaches building personal resume sites.
The literary niche, specifically autobiographies, personal essays, and poetry portfolios, benefits immensely from the deeply personal and reflective tone of the word "moi".
- Target Users: Independent authors, poets, and personal essayists.
Because "moi" is short, punchy, and phonetic, it fits perfectly into the modern English colloquialism of "Who, moi?" or as a name for interactive personal assistants and AI companions.
- Target Users: Developers building personalized AI avatars, chat bots, or customizable productivity apps.
Beyond French, "moi" is a casual "hello" in Finnish, and means "new" (mới) in Vietnamese. This opens up niche domestic marketing opportunities for localized startups in Helsinki or Hanoi.
- Target Users: Finnish lifestyle brands or Vietnamese modern tech startups looking for short, catchy domestic branding.
What a playful .moi domain hack might look like
A domain hack is a clever trick where the word before the dot (the Second-Level Domain, or SLD) and the word after the dot (the Top-Level Domain, or TLD) are read together as a single continuous word or fluid phrase. With the .moi gTLD, a word before the dot can play into a domain hack in three distinct ways:The Full-Word Concatenation (Spelling a Single Word)
This is when the letters before the dot combine with "moi" to spell out a single, longer English or French word.
- How it works: The word before the dot ends precisely where "moi" begins.
- Examples:
- tur.moi turmoi (archaic variant of turmoil)
- cham.moi chamoi (alternative spelling of chamois, the leather/animal)
- ar.moi armoi (French for mugwort/herbs)
In English, "moi" is frequently used in a playful, dramatic, or slightly arrogant context (e.g., "Who, moi?"). You can use verbs or adjectives before the dot to form complete phrases.
- How it works: The dot acts as a silent space or a connector between an action/descriptor and the pronoun.
- Examples:
- blame.moi Blame moi (Blame me)
- choose.moi Choose moi (Choose me)
- not.moi Not moi (Not me)
- excuse.moi Excuse moi (Excuse me, a perfect cross-linguistic pun)
Because "moi" means "me" or "myself" in French, the word before the dot can be a French verb, preposition, or noun that grammatically requires "moi" to complete the thought.
- How it works: The domain creates an instant, highly memorable command or identity in the French language.
- Examples:
- suivez.moi Suivez-moi (Follow me)
- aidez.moi Aidez-moi (Help me)
- regarde.moi Regarde-moi (Look at me)
- chez.moi Chez moi (My home / At my place)
- avec.moi Avec moi (With me)
10 lead sources for a .moi domain outbound campaign
1. Malt (Malt.fr / Malt.be)Malt is the largest freelance marketplace in France and Belgium. It is a goldmine for independent professionals who care deeply about personal branding.
- Best For: Finding elite French copywriters, designers, consultants, and developers.
- Search Strategy: Filter by location (Paris, Lyon, Brussels) and look for top-tier freelancers with long, unmemorable current domain names.
LinkedIn allows you to micro-target professionals in specific geographic regions who use personal portfolio sites to land clients.
- Best For: French executive coaches, speaker-authors, and boutique agency owners.
- Search Strategy: Search for titles like "Consultant Indépendant" or "Conférencier" located in France/Canada, then filter for profiles that list a standard .com or .fr personal website in their contact info.
Instagram is the primary hub for micro-influencers who desperately need clean vanity URLs to replace cluttered link-in-bio services (like Linktree or Linkin.bio).
- Best For: Fashion, beauty, lifestyle creators, and coaches.
- Search Strategy: Scrape or search hashtags like #FrenchBlogger, #LifestyleFr, or #ExploreParis. Look for creators using messy link-in-bio URLs like linktr.ee/username and pitch them a clean username.moi.
These are the premier global platforms for visual creatives. Many French and francophone creators showcase work here but use clunky subdomains for their personal portfolios.
- Best For: Graphic designers, UI/UX designers, and digital illustrators.
- Search Strategy: Filter users by location (e.g., Montreal, Paris, Geneva). Target creatives who currently point their work to a free subdomain (e.g., ://myportfolio.com or artistname.behance.net) and offer them a premium .moi upgrade.
TikTok creators rely heavily on quick, audio-friendly domain names because users only have a split second to read a bio.
- Best For: Gen Z and Millennial creators building a distinct individual identity.
- Search Strategy: Target French-speaking TikTok creators with over 10k followers. Pitch a phrase-based domain hack like regarde.moi (Look at me) or suivez.moi (Follow me).
Independent writers, journalists, and solo essayists frequently use these platforms to build an audience but eventually need a custom personal brand home.
- Best For: Authors, memoirists, poets, and political commentators.
- Search Strategy: Look through French-language newsletters and blogs. Target writers who are growing quickly but don't yet have a personalized, dedicated custom domain mapping their publication.
Small, artisanal, or luxury businesses in France often value poetic or conversational branding.
- Best For: Independent fashion designers, custom tailors, high-end salons, and artisan shops.
- Search Strategy: Search terms like "Créateur de mode Paris" or "Haute couture Lyon". Identify shops with outdated, overly complicated websites that could be refreshed with a punchy .moi alternative.
Instead of searching by user, search the platforms they use. You can use search engine operators to find people using free, unbranded landing pages.
- Best For: Finding unbranded creators at scale.
- Search Strategy: Use Google dorks like site:linktr.ee "paris" or site:beacons.ai "bordeaux" to find hundreds of local creators using free accounts who are ready for a professional custom domain upgrade.
Similar to Malt, Upwork hosts thousands of solo practitioners who rely on digital pitches to win contracts.
- Best For: Agency founders and elite remote freelancers in Quebec, France, and Switzerland.
- Search Strategy: Set the freelancer location filter to French-speaking nations. Review their portfolios to see who is using generic email addresses (like Gmail) or long URLs, and pitch them a professional .moi alternative.
Because "Moi" means "Hello" in Finnish, it makes an excellent, friendly branding tool for hyper-local consumer startups in Finland.
- Best For: Finnish coffee shops, modern tech apps, or local service businesses.
- Search Strategy: Look up newly registered startups or local consumer businesses in Helsinki. Target brands looking for a casual, highly memorable domestic hook (e.g., tervetuloa.moi / Welcome Hello).
- How to leverage an Ai Assistant to find domain leads
- How to leverage Social media to find domain leads
- How to leverage Job Boards to find domain leads
- eMail Marketing Best Practices for Domain Outreach
- List of FREE tools for outbound domain sales
- Outbound Domain sales Tips
Legal considerations when selling a domain to an existing business
Approaching a business to sell them a domain name that matches or closely resembles their existing trademark is a high-stakes strategy. Legally, this borders on a practice known as cybersquatting. If handled incorrectly, your approach can be used as direct evidence against you in a lawsuit or an administrative proceeding.Bad Faith and the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy)
The UDRP is an international administrative process established by ICANN to resolve domain disputes. If a trademark owner files a UDRP claim against you, they will win and force a free transfer of the domain if they can prove three things:
- Your domain is identical or confusingly similar to their trademark.
- You have no rights or legitimate interests in the domain name.
- The domain was registered and is being used in bad faith.
The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA)
If the business or trademark owner is located in the United States, they do not just have to rely on the UDRP; they can sue you in federal court under the ACPA.
- Financial Liability: Unlike the UDRP (which only transfers the domain), the ACPA allows trademark owners to sue for actual damages or statutory damages ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 per domain name.
- The Outbound Risk: Proving an "intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark" is a core requirement of the ACPA. A cold email offering to sell them the domain is often treated by U.S. courts as a smoking gun of bad faith intent.
If you host a "parking page" on the domain that automatically generates pay-per-click (PPC) ads related to the trademark owner's industry, you are committing trademark infringement. You are using their brand name to divert their potential customers to competitors for financial gain. Furthermore, if the brand is famous, you could be cited for trademark dilution, tarnishing or blurring the uniqueness of their established brand.
How to Potentially Structure Your Campaign
If you own .moi domains and want to reach out to businesses legally, you must shift your approach from "flipping a trademark" to offering a legitimate branding asset.
- Target Generic/Descriptive Terms Only: Do not register or pitch unique, fanciful brand names (e.g., nike.moi or rolex.moi). Stick strictly to generic words, dictionary terms, or common short phrases (e.g., boutique.moi, style.moi, suivez.moi). Multiple businesses can share trademarks on generic words across different industries, which drastically lowers the claim of bad faith.
- Never Set an Initial Price: Do not include a price tag in your initial outbound outreach. Let the prospect express interest first.
- Frame it as a Branding Upgrade, Not an Ultimatum: Frame the email around the creative utility of the .moi extension (e.g., how it fits their French-speaking market or functions as a short link-in-bio). Never imply that you will sell it to their competitor or disrupt their business if they refuse to buy.
Potential .moi domain investing strategy
Based on our analysis of the .moi gTLD, including its 898 current registrations (via DNS.Coffee), its recent 232.6% 5-year growth surge, its rock-bottom aftermarket transaction history, and severe trademark legal constraints, the extension requires a highly specific investment strategy. Because registration and renewal costs are relatively high ($22.00–$29.00/year) compared to .com, a "bulk registration" or "domain hoarding" strategy will quickly drain your capital. Instead, the best path forward is a Hyper-Targeted, High-Velocity Domain Hack Strategy focused on the French-speaking digital creator economy.The Recommended Strategy: The French "Micro-Hack" Portfolio
Instead of buying generic nouns (e.g., shoes.moi), you should exclusively register high-utility conversational verbs or premium personal branding templates in French, holding them for rapid outbound flips rather than long-term passive parking.
The Inventory Blueprint (What to Buy)
Focus entirely on three distinct buckets of inventory that carry zero trademark risks and have clear end-user alignment:
- Actionable Imperatives (French): Register short, single-word French verbs that act as calls-to-action for social media.
- Examples: Abonnes.moi (Subscribe to me), Regarde.moi (Watch me), Ecoute.moi (Listen to me), Visite.moi (Visit me).
- Bespoke Identity Templates: Target high-value freelance verticals.
- Examples: Design.moi (Design me), Coach.moi (Coach me), Avocat.moi (Lawyer me).
- Premium Conversational Puns: Cross-lingual phrases that English and French speakers use playfully.
- Examples: Excuse.moi, Cest.moi (It's me), Allo.moi (Hello me).
- Consolidate Registrars: Buy exclusively through Porkbun or use promo codes on NicNames / NameSilo to keep your initial acquisition costs near the $20.00–$22.00 baseline. Avoid legacy registrars like Gandi that charge over $40.
- Do Not Auto-Renew: Set a strict 12-month expiration rule. If a .moi domain does not sell within its first year of targeted outbound marketing, drop it. The renewal fee is too high to justify holding stagnant inventory in a low-volume registry.
Because there is no organic inbound marketplace traffic for .moi, you must create the demand.
- Build "Link-in-Bio" Landers: Instead of leaving a parked page with generic ads, set up a free, beautiful minimalist landing page on the domain (using tools like Carrd). Show a mockup of what an influencer's profile could look like using that exact domain.
- Execute Hyper-Targeted Social Outbound: Use the Malt.fr and Instagram lead generation methods. Find mid-tier French creators or consultants who are enjoying rapid follower growth but still using long URLs or free linktr.ee/username links.
- Price for Frictionless Impulse Buying: Do not target corporate acquisitions for thousands of dollars. Price your domains as a premium branding upgrade between $250 to $495. For a successful French freelancer or micro-influencer, this is a business expense they can authorize instantly without corporate approval, netting you a 1,000%+ ROI on your initial $22 investment.
Helpful Outbound articles and tools
- How to leverage an Ai Assistant to find domain leads
- How to leverage Social media to find domain leads
- How to leverage Job Boards to find domain leads
- eMail Marketing Best Practices for Domain Outreach
- List of FREE tools for outbound domain sales
- Outbound Domain sales Tips
Questions for you
- Do you own any .moi domains?
- If so, how are they doing for you?
- Thinking about investing into .moi domains?
- If so, what niche will you target and why?
What works for one may not work for another and vice versa.
