7 ms·

The million dollar mystery behind Milk.com

26 points by danso 1y ago

Brajeshwar 1y ago
In a weird way, when someone mentions something about milk with a domain name, it always remind me of the Milk Table. https://milk.dk https://milk.dk
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Not to be confused with a milking table. (Not a term I'd recommend googling at work, by the way.)
- mzajc 1y ago
  I don't dislike the design, but this (500€!) aquarium is criminally small, and there's two fish in there! https://milk.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Milk_aquarium-1024x683.jpg https://milk.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Milk_aquarium-102...
Mistletoe 1y ago
https://milk.com/value/ https://milk.com/value/ I think he’s aiming a bit high with 10 milly. I’d take 1 or 5.
- stevage 1y ago
  I'd love to have a job that I liked so much I'd keep doing it rather than cash out a domain name and retire.
  - gnfargbl 1y ago
    If you look through his LinkedIn [1], he was at Google from 2005-2011, as the tech lead for Dalvik, and spent some time as a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack. I would guess he can probably retire anytime he likes. Agree that $10M is too high, but you have to drop your anchor somewhere. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfuzz/details/experience/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfuzz/details/experience/
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  If the milk marketing budget is truly 100 million a year (a cursory check shows it's likely closer to 200 million now) as he mentions, 10 million doesn't seem very high at all. So they've had a 100 million per year marketing budget for at least 10 years. Let's say they spent 1% per year towards the domain... The opportunity cost for not having something as obvious and useful as milk.com seems significant. To me it seems like they've already made a mistake by not paying up despite having the means, and now they've dug their foot in. They've spent hundreds of millions on billboards, yet they can't even put "milk.com" on their billboards next to "got milk". Imo but 5% less billboards for a few years and buy the domain...
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    Idk it seems like everyone knows about milk at this point, is milk.com vital? We buy our books at Amazon.com not books.com. And you wouldn’t even buy milk at milk.com it would just be info about milk.
    - Fade_Dance 1y ago
      I agree it sort of seems like a waste of money, but this is what they are doing year after year - spending money to promote milk. May as well stretch to have milk.com at that point if you plan on spending 100 mil a year for the foreseeable future on promotion. Then again, they've already blown through the entire old-school .com age without getting the domain, maybe they are better off just riding it out until web addresses are entirely irrelevant rather than just mostly irrelevant.
  - gdbsjjdn 1y ago
    The value isn't to the milk cartel, it's to alternative milk producers. Imagine an ad for a new oat milk with "milk.com" as the domain. It's got a ton of media value.
    - enlyth 1y ago
      In some countries you're not allowed to call them milk, for example, in the UK a judge ruled that they must be called something like "oat drink" instead.
- alexharrisnyc 1y ago
  If you listen to the podcast, if I recall correctly, he said he’d consider numbers higher than 1m.
- immibis 1y ago
  This is why you're not a CEO. You would fail to extract maximal shareholder value.
Waterluvian 1y ago
If he’s sitting on a domain that’s actually worth millions and has a well-paying job, maybe he’d get a bite for “I’ll accept less than 10 if you match it 1:1 with a donation to <charity>.” It’s his and he can do what he wants. In fact I think it’s cool that there’s still a Classic Web holdout like this. But there’s latent joy locked away in that url.
- reactordev 1y ago
  There are a lot of people that saw domain names as real estate in the 90s. :D
- RyJones 1y ago
  I had a lot of offers for wicker.com. In 98? 99? some guy asked what I wanted, and I said give me something interesting so I have a good story to tell. He offered a 1544 Dante, which I accepted. His gig was auctioning estates and his wife imported and sold wicker.
dr_dshiv 1y ago
This guy worked at Danger! Man I loved my Hiptop/Sidekick
rwmj 1y ago
purple.com was a similar thing. Originally the site had just a FAQ page about how they didn't want to sell the domain: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple.com/faq.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple... https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple.com/availability.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple... I just checked now and it's one of those mattress drop-shipping sites :-(
- dtech 1y ago
  I guess everyone has a price
- brightbeige 1y ago
  I use http://neverssl.com http://neverssl.com as its replacement when checking internet connectivity.
- dawnerd 1y ago
  I hope the original owner made a fortune from it and not had it taken via a trademark dispute.
thomassmith65 1y ago
Back in the internet's early days, it was easy to get a domain name. They were cheap or even free. That is not exactly how I remember things. Everyone bought domains from one registrar (was it Network Solutions?) and the cheapest domain started at around $100. There were all sorts of short and trademarked dot-coms available though, that is true. I'm going by ancient memory here and would love it if someone corrects me.
- rwmj 1y ago
  Plus you could only interact with NS by filling in fields in a text file and emailing it to them, and hoping you did it right so their script made the changes you intended. Even at the time, this was annoying.
- neom 1y ago
  You could get free domains in the 90s still, a few that were totally free because they wanted to sell you hosting, many of them ad supported with an iframe however (although you could easily break out of the iframe and present your content without it).
  - kragen 1y ago
    Ads on the internet were mostly prohibited during the early-internet period due to the NSFNET AUP.
    - neom 1y ago
      I used NameZero for johnedgar.com in 98, and it had an iframe ad, Freeservers, FortuneCity, and Xoom also all gave free domains in exchange for ads.
      - kragen 1y ago
        Yes, but that was about five or ten years after the end of the early internet, well into the dot-com bubble. The internet proper had been operating for 20 years at that point, and the first ARPANET packets were 29 years earlier. The NSFNET AUP had ceased to be a factor 3 years earlier: https://www.merit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Retiring-the-NSFNET-Backbone-Service_-Chronicling-the-End-of-an-Era-1.pdf https://www.merit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Retiring-th... All of those companies were founded in the com-priv era.
indigodaddy 1y ago
I believe this was one of, if not the first site to implement a barcode/UPC generator. Current iteration here: https://milk.com/barcode/ https://milk.com/barcode/
m-hodges 1y ago
I thought this was going to be about Kevin Rose.¹ ¹ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million-angel-round-packed-with-valley-names/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million...
oulipo2 1y ago
The guy pretends he doesn't want to sell the website, all while hinting exactly at who might want to buy it and for how much... lol
vitalnodo 1y ago
I found out about milk.com when I was thinking about how to make an Android app completely from scratch (assembling DEX bytes from zero, kind of like writing an assembler for the Dalvik VM). That’s when I came across the author of the DEX format, Dan Bornstein — and I was surprised he actually owns a domain like that.

26 points by danso 1y ago

In a weird way, when someone mentions something about milk with a domain name, it always remind me of the Milk Table. https://milk.dk https://milk.dk

decimalenough 1y ago
Not to be confused with a milking table. (Not a term I'd recommend googling at work, by the way.)
mzajc 1y ago
I don't dislike the design, but this (500€!) aquarium is criminally small, and there's two fish in there! https://milk.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Milk_aquarium-1024x683.jpg https://milk.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Milk_aquarium-102...

Mistletoe 1y ago

https://milk.com/value/ https://milk.com/value/ I think he’s aiming a bit high with 10 milly. I’d take 1 or 5.

stevage 1y ago
I'd love to have a job that I liked so much I'd keep doing it rather than cash out a domain name and retire.
- gnfargbl 1y ago
  If you look through his LinkedIn [1], he was at Google from 2005-2011, as the tech lead for Dalvik, and spent some time as a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack. I would guess he can probably retire anytime he likes. Agree that $10M is too high, but you have to drop your anchor somewhere. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfuzz/details/experience/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfuzz/details/experience/
Fade_Dance 1y ago
If the milk marketing budget is truly 100 million a year (a cursory check shows it's likely closer to 200 million now) as he mentions, 10 million doesn't seem very high at all. So they've had a 100 million per year marketing budget for at least 10 years. Let's say they spent 1% per year towards the domain... The opportunity cost for not having something as obvious and useful as milk.com seems significant. To me it seems like they've already made a mistake by not paying up despite having the means, and now they've dug their foot in. They've spent hundreds of millions on billboards, yet they can't even put "milk.com" on their billboards next to "got milk". Imo but 5% less billboards for a few years and buy the domain...
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Idk it seems like everyone knows about milk at this point, is milk.com vital? We buy our books at Amazon.com not books.com. And you wouldn’t even buy milk at milk.com it would just be info about milk.
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    I agree it sort of seems like a waste of money, but this is what they are doing year after year - spending money to promote milk. May as well stretch to have milk.com at that point if you plan on spending 100 mil a year for the foreseeable future on promotion. Then again, they've already blown through the entire old-school .com age without getting the domain, maybe they are better off just riding it out until web addresses are entirely irrelevant rather than just mostly irrelevant.
- gdbsjjdn 1y ago
  The value isn't to the milk cartel, it's to alternative milk producers. Imagine an ad for a new oat milk with "milk.com" as the domain. It's got a ton of media value.
  - enlyth 1y ago
    In some countries you're not allowed to call them milk, for example, in the UK a judge ruled that they must be called something like "oat drink" instead.
alexharrisnyc 1y ago
If you listen to the podcast, if I recall correctly, he said he’d consider numbers higher than 1m.
immibis 1y ago
This is why you're not a CEO. You would fail to extract maximal shareholder value.

Waterluvian 1y ago

If he’s sitting on a domain that’s actually worth millions and has a well-paying job, maybe he’d get a bite for “I’ll accept less than 10 if you match it 1:1 with a donation to <charity>.” It’s his and he can do what he wants. In fact I think it’s cool that there’s still a Classic Web holdout like this. But there’s latent joy locked away in that url.

reactordev 1y ago
There are a lot of people that saw domain names as real estate in the 90s. :D
RyJones 1y ago
I had a lot of offers for wicker.com. In 98? 99? some guy asked what I wanted, and I said give me something interesting so I have a good story to tell. He offered a 1544 Dante, which I accepted. His gig was auctioning estates and his wife imported and sold wicker.

dr_dshiv 1y ago

This guy worked at Danger! Man I loved my Hiptop/Sidekick

rwmj 1y ago

purple.com was a similar thing. Originally the site had just a FAQ page about how they didn't want to sell the domain: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple.com/faq.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple... https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple.com/availability.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple... I just checked now and it's one of those mattress drop-shipping sites :-(

dtech 1y ago
I guess everyone has a price
brightbeige 1y ago
I use http://neverssl.com http://neverssl.com as its replacement when checking internet connectivity.
dawnerd 1y ago
I hope the original owner made a fortune from it and not had it taken via a trademark dispute.

thomassmith65 1y ago

Back in the internet's early days, it was easy to get a domain name. They were cheap or even free. That is not exactly how I remember things. Everyone bought domains from one registrar (was it Network Solutions?) and the cheapest domain started at around $100. There were all sorts of short and trademarked dot-coms available though, that is true. I'm going by ancient memory here and would love it if someone corrects me.

rwmj 1y ago
Plus you could only interact with NS by filling in fields in a text file and emailing it to them, and hoping you did it right so their script made the changes you intended. Even at the time, this was annoying.
neom 1y ago
You could get free domains in the 90s still, a few that were totally free because they wanted to sell you hosting, many of them ad supported with an iframe however (although you could easily break out of the iframe and present your content without it).
- kragen 1y ago
  Ads on the internet were mostly prohibited during the early-internet period due to the NSFNET AUP.
  - neom 1y ago
    I used NameZero for johnedgar.com in 98, and it had an iframe ad, Freeservers, FortuneCity, and Xoom also all gave free domains in exchange for ads.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Yes, but that was about five or ten years after the end of the early internet, well into the dot-com bubble. The internet proper had been operating for 20 years at that point, and the first ARPANET packets were 29 years earlier. The NSFNET AUP had ceased to be a factor 3 years earlier: https://www.merit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Retiring-the-NSFNET-Backbone-Service_-Chronicling-the-End-of-an-Era-1.pdf https://www.merit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Retiring-th... All of those companies were founded in the com-priv era.

indigodaddy 1y ago

I believe this was one of, if not the first site to implement a barcode/UPC generator. Current iteration here: https://milk.com/barcode/ https://milk.com/barcode/

m-hodges 1y ago

I thought this was going to be about Kevin Rose.¹ ¹ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million-angel-round-packed-with-valley-names/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million...

oulipo2 1y ago

The guy pretends he doesn't want to sell the website, all while hinting exactly at who might want to buy it and for how much... lol

vitalnodo 1y ago

I found out about milk.com when I was thinking about how to make an Android app completely from scratch (assembling DEX bytes from zero, kind of like writing an assembler for the Dalvik VM). That’s when I came across the author of the DEX format, Dan Bornstein — and I was surprised he actually owns a domain like that.