9 ms·
The Value of Milk.com
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoSome previous discussions with its various titles: I Got Milk.com (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591357 Not for Sale (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181284
- webprofusion 2y agoThe problem here is nobody milk-related cares and it would most likely get bought by a VC funded startup and become the name of some sort of AI js bundler tool.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoI'd bet, plenty of startups would love to have that domain. Biomilq, Remilk, Zero Cow Factory, Real Deal Milk. Problem is, startups rarely have $10M to spend on a domain name. Give it a decade, one of them will probably bite.
- deathanatos 2y agoIDK, if it was milk.io, milk.ai, maybe milk.xyz, then maybe we'd be talking, but milk.com? It's so … pedestrian. /s … I hope.
- silisili 2y agoThat's what I was thinking. I've never really thought 'hey I like milk, I should check out the website', and I'd be surprised if anybody does. A boutique brand probably wants their name everywhere, including the domain. So that just leaves the milk industry at whole, which I imagine doesn't care that much, either. At least with the vidalia onion guy, he was able to do something with it. Milk is super perishable, hard to transport, and typically pretty regional, so that's probably out too. I have a feeling this guy will end up dying owning a domain he made -$800 or so dollars on, and the registrar will auction it off for a fraction of his perceived value.
- jjulius 2y ago>The problem here... ... is that there is no problem. They're just being silly.
- jameslk 2y agoFrom a negotiation perspective, it seems the domain owner has set an upper limit to how much they could make from the domain.
- devoutsalsa 2y agoSomething is worth what people are willing to pay for it. If it hasn't been sold for 8 figures, and the owner is willing to sell, then it's not worth 8 figures.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoNot so, if Milk.com was actually suddenly worth 50 million dollars, they would most likely receive multiple 10 million dollar offers in less than the time it would take for them to close on the first, leading to them likely moving to auction it or try listing it for a higher price. Otherwise, the tactic of listing houses for less than the desired selling price in the name of attracting attention and relying on bidding wars to drive the price higher would never work.
- klipt 2y agoPer Henry George we should tax this kind of speculation and rent seeking, by taxing things like land and internet domains. We could use the money to reduce our national debt, or pay for things like healthcare and education.
- woodruffw 2y agoI don’t think Georgism applies very cleanly to the DNS. It works well for land because a Georgist tax is essentially an incentive to improve the land or sell it to someone who will; it’s unclear that a tax on milk.com will improve milk.com.
- makeitdouble 2y agoAs I get it, this guy is not making any money from owning the domain, and doesn't seem to be actively trying to. What would you tax then ?
- lmm 2y agoYou'd tax them some proportion of the fair market value of the domain, not their revenue, just like with any other form of land.
- danfuzz 2y agoHow would you calculate the FMV of milk.com?
- greyface- 2y agoWhat's the highest offer for it that you've rejected? That seems like a fair lower bound. (Not that I necessarily support a Georgist tax in this case, since it seems that your interest in the domain is noncommercial in nature)
- makeitdouble 2y agoWouldn't that allow random people to increase your tax on domains you obviously don't want to sell ? E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ just for the fun of it, either you literally give up your name (I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take) or you're stuck with a percent of that to pay every month/year even as nothing else changed for you.
- Reubend 2y agoThe owner is dreaming if they think that domain is worth $10 million. But that's fine, because they like the name, and there's no reason to sell it for a number they're not happy for. Personally, I wish we had more TLDs. Many of the most useful ones are expensive because of rent seeking companies that became the main registrar for them.
- jjulius 2y ago>The owner is dreaming if they think that domain is worth $10 million. I think you're taking that a weeeeee bit too seriously. One gets the sense that they just like having the domain and don't really care about the offers. Maybe he would if it's "high enough", sure, but much of this reads tongue-in-cheek.
- Reubend 2y agoYou're probably right. $10 million might be metaphorical.
- ksec 2y agoI am still waiting for .Web, and it doesn't look like it will come soon.
- x3sphere 2y agoLooking at sales of other domains I don’t think 10M is insane for the right buyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_..., Beer.com sold for 7M in 2004.
- altdataseller 2y agoThat was 20 years ago
- Reubend 2y agoBut beer is a much more valuable category for advertisement, and potentially a much more lucrative domain to have. There are social networks devoted to beer (Untappd), communities oriented around it, etc.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoFun fact. I approached a domain squatter for my name as a domain name (obviously not going to provide it) ending in a .com. I asked out of curiosity what they wanted. They were talking on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mind you, my name isn't... uncommon, but it's not common either, and this was a firstlast.com variety. I looked through the web archive and could see the domain had literally not ever had a website, since it was originally registered in 1995. Now, I wasn't expecting to get it for $15 a year like a hover subscription, but still. 6 figures of value based on what?
- teractiveodular 2y agoBased on the squatters having thousands of domains, so it's not worth their time to negotiate with small fry, they focus squarely on the big fish. See also, the VC investment model that relies on the 1% breakout success covering losses on the remaining 99%.
- e40 2y agoMy lastname.com was nabbed a month before I tried to get it, then I had to watch for decades while they didn’t use it.
- DaSHacka 2y agoI suspect its like the New York City landlord conundrum; the squatter holds out for years pricing their listings at way more than their worth, hoping that a whale will come along one day and cover their losses by purchasing a single domain/property.
- Dig1t 2y agoIt is the exact same situation with beer.com Their presentation is a little better though.
- lolinder 2y agoThis isn't at all the same—this is just one guy who registered a domain forever ago and actually uses it for a bunch of random things [0] and doesn't really want to sell it but would if he got a good enough offer. Beer.com is literally just a contact form advertising a whole bunch of squatted domains which all just redirect to that contact form and are all owned by an investment firm called afterTHOUGHT, Inc. There's no early internet charm, just pure capitalism waiting for a buyer. [0] https://milk.com/ https://milk.com/
- cowmix 2y agoWhen I had my ISP back in the early 90s, everyone in the office registered all those "generic" domains (along with trademarked ones too). My ex-business partner originally registered beer.com, his sister did game.com (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTuQgUe-CME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTuQgUe-CME), our billing manager did subway.com and someone even did wallstreet.com. Those were the days.
- jlund-molfese 2y agoHonestly I feel like milk.com is more valuable. Because the US milk industry is commoditized, while beer isn't. An individual beer company doesn't want beer.com, they want budweiser.com—at most, I could see a redirect. You can't sell alcohol efficiently online, and beer review sites don't make very much money.
- teractiveodular 2y agoDon't miss his responses to random misguided people: https://milk.com/experiments/ https://milk.com/experiments/
- bruce511 2y agoI notice he mentions the -revenues- of the milk boards as justification for his price. But revenues are not the same as "discretional income". I'm guessing most of their costs are fixed. And I'm guessing their variable-cost departments would be less keen on sacrificing 10 mil on a "vanity domain".
- jimt1234 2y agoAlso, just because a potential buyer has the money doesn't mean he/she is gonna automatically pay what you're asking. I can try to sell my 2000 Nissan Frontier pickup truck for $50K, and a lot of people have $50K, but that doesn't mean anyone is actually gonna give me that much. (Note: if you want a sweet 2000 Nissan Frontier pickup truck, I can sell you mine for, say, $10K. It's only got ~300K miles on it. And it's worth $50K!)
- whalesalad 2y agoThe domain is worthless, unless you manage to transform it into a successful business. No one is direct navigating to milk.com.
- lolinder 2y agoThere are a lot of people commenting assuming that this guy actually wants to sell the domain for $10 million some day. I don't read this that way at all— it sounds to me like he's very content owning the domain but has set a really high number for which he'd realistically be unable to say no and publicized that number to try to get people to stop contacting him. Unlike domain squatters he's actually using this domain actively, with an update this year. This is a charming and fun bit of the early internet that's still maintained and has a silly anti-sales pitch for the domain name to try to stem the flood of emails, not a greedy speculator sitting on a good property to maybe earn a profit.
- greentext 2y ago[flagged]
- jjulius 2y ago... it's tongue-in-cheek. Yikes.
- greentext 2y ago[flagged]
- jjulius 2y agoI don't really see anything wrong with saying "yikes" to someone who is needlessly over the top with calling someone an "entitled asshole". It's a bit sad to see someone so rude or angry over something meant so lightly. I hope you have a pleasant evening. :) Edit: Well, those are quite the edits you've made there. There was no "reading into" your comment necessary - you called the person an entitled asshole. Your initial comment was downvoted into the grey before I even responded, and you insinuated that I was being snarky simply for saying "yikes" to your "entitled asshole" comment. If you truly thought that I was out to "make [you] look bad", perhaps you could've clarified your original statement in that response to me, rather than calling me snarky? Seems like that would've been an opportune time to have a mature conversation. Others also downvoted your second response prior to you editing it, too. Seems there was no need for me to convince anyone of anything. Not sure what your deal is, but you do, respectfully, seem tightly wound. I also, for what it's worth, don't really give a damn what anybody thinks about my posts, so I'm not sure who I'd be trying to convince of anything. I sincerely hope your evening improves!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- greentext 2y agoNice. The "edit" portion was very clever! Now write a short, trite comment.
- bruce511 2y agoNot to be morbid, but I wonder what will happen to the domain when he dies. And more generally what happens to this sort of domain going forward. Basically the domain becomes part of the estate, but its super easy for it just to expire and be claimed by either a legit company or more likely a professional squatter. It'll then go on the market for a "fair" price (which I guess is < 10 mil). The estate gets nothing. Or, knowing the value, the executor / heirs bother to renew the domain and seek a buyer. Which again < 10 mil, cause presumably they just want to sell it. The 10mil anchor may be a psychological hindrance there; if the real value is say 100k, it's going to sound a LOT less than 10 mil. But frankly we know it's-not- worth 10 mil. My heirs would have no idea what domains I own, how to renew them, or if they're worth any money. (Hint - they're worth nothing.) But if you own a domain that does have value, you might want to make an information pack about it and stash that with your important "when I die" papers.
- joegibbs 2y agoI don't think that domains are worth nearly as much as they were 15-25 years ago. Back at the start of the web a lot of people would go to sites by typing in the URL directly, which made it worth something to have the perfect domain for your business sector - people heard the name of the brand and went to [whatever].com. Since search engines took off, most people would go to Google first and then type in the brand. Also, most .com domains got taken off the market, and people started to realise that you don't need a perfect domain, it can be a bit off. Valve's Steam is the biggest PC game store in the world, and it's still on store.steampowered.com, not steam.com. Now, domains are more like vanity licence plates or NFTs. The most expensive domain sale was CarInsurance.com for about $50m, and that was back in 2010, even though the tech sector has grown so much since then. Maybe in the future they'll make a comeback with how much worse Google has been getting - who knows?
- x3sphere 2y agoI agree it’s not as important. There have still been some rather high .com sales though… Ai.com sold for 11M recently. Now personally, I have never accessed ChatGPT through that domain and never seen it even linked from that.
- satvikpendem 2y agoEven ChatGPT's domain for quite a while used to be chat.openai.com, which only recently redirects to chatgpt.com.
- cortesoft 2y agoI feel like the rise of advertising malware attacks (where someone places a google ad on a domain name they don’t own, so that people searching for that site directly are tricked into clicking on the malware ad instead) is bringing back typing domains directly. I know I have personally started avoiding using google search as my dns.
- p0w3n3d 2y agoPeople indeed are using search engines (i.e. Google) to navigate to domains (I saw even people who entered the fqdn into Google only to see it as the third/fourth link after the ads) however as Google indeed is the ruler of souls (I saw also people not finding the domain in the links, despite having it entered into google) I dare say whole world business depends on search engines (i.e. google) and this must stop.