Countries that have cashed in on their top-level domain names

LONDON — Anguilla is raking in extra returns from registration fees for its .ai web domain thanks to the artificial intelligence boom, but it’s not the only place cashing in on demand for websites with distinctive address endings.

Here’s a look at some other places cashing in on their distinctive top-level domains:

Tuvalu is a string of coral atolls, scattered over hundreds of miles in the Pacific Ocean, located midway between Australia and Hawaii. It has one of the globe’s smallest economies and its low-lying islands are vulnerable to climate transformation, but it does have a very valuable resource: the .tv web domain. Royalties from .tv, which web users might assume is short for television, have been climbing, especially after videogame streaming platform Twitch licensed the web address twitch.tv.

The North African country, which has been plagued by turmoil since longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s death in 2011, isn’t readily associated with internet population. But Libya controls web addresses that complete in .ly, which have become widely used as a so-called domain hack for websites with English names that complete in -ly. Well-known examples include bit.ly, used by the weblink shortening service Bitly, and parse.ly, the website for online analytics platform Parse.ly.

This Balkan country became an independent country after the breakup of Yugoslavia. It’s one of Europe’s smaller countries — about 620,000 people — bordered by the Adriatic Sea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and Albania. Montenegro was assigned the .me web domain, which has become popular with people who desire to claim their pronoun for personal branding.

Websites ending in .me are “often used for personal websites, portfolios, blogs and online resumes or portfolios because ‘me’ can be seen as a way to personalize an online presence,” website builder Wix says.

Websites that complete in .co aren’t from a generic web domain for companies, like .com sites. The .co domain is assigned to Colombia, but the South American country allows anyone to sign up for its web addresses. Internet registrar GoDaddy says more than 2 million .co web domains have been claimed, including addresses claimed by large Tech names like Amazon which uses it to redirect online shoppers to its .com home page. Google, meanwhile, informs visitors to g.co that the link is it’s official shortcut.