The Value of Milk.com | Hacker News Reader

The Value of Milk.com

milk.com

There 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.

Yeah, this is exactly my takeaway, as well. Whole bunch of folk in these comments are taking this way too seriously lol.

Relax, enjoy it for what it is. I chuckled.

This is also my take.

;)

I 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?

I 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.

Even ChatGPT's domain for quite a while used to be chat.openai.com, which only recently redirects to chatgpt.com.

I 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.

People 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.

Don't miss his responses to random misguided people:

https://milk.com/experiments/

The 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.

I'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.

IDK, 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.

That'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.

>The problem here...

... is that there is no problem. They're just being silly.

The 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.

>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.

You're probably right. $10 million might be metaphorical.

I am still waiting for .Web, and it doesn't look like it will come soon.

Looking 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_..., Beer.com sold for 7M in 2004.

That was 20 years ago

But 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.

Sony offered Marvel 5 billion for Spider Man. Is it worth it? Probs not. But now Marvel would stop wasting time sending offers. It's the piss off price.

The domain owner is getting tons of offers for their domain and its a waste of their time. Now, slap $10 million, make it large and visible. So everyone can just go away. It's strategically better to put some high value to filter out everyone.

$5B for ownership of Spider-Man, including worldwide exclusive perpetual rights to the character itself, all derivative works, all the media (comic books, movies, TV shows, etc.) could well be worth the price. I'm not an accountant or IP valuation expert, but there's a lot of money in that brand. Far more than a mere domain name, at least.

Fun 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?

Based 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%.

My 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.

I 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.

I 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".

Also, 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!)

Some previous discussions with its various titles:

I Got Milk.com (2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591357

Not for Sale (2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181284

Not 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.

From a negotiation perspective, it seems the domain owner has set an upper limit to how much they could make from the domain.

Something 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.

Not 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.

The domain is worthless, unless you manage to transform it into a successful business. No one is direct navigating to milk.com.

It is the exact same situation with beer.com

Their presentation is a little better though.

This 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/

When 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), our billing manager did subway.com and someone even did wallstreet.com.

Those were the days.

Honestly 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.

Per 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.

I 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.

As 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 ?

You'd tax them some proportion of the fair market value of the domain, not their revenue, just like with any other form of land.

How would you calculate the FMV of milk.com?

What'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)

Wouldn'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.

> 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.

If you're willing to pay $10000 for it, even if only out of spite, then it's worth that much yeah. The domain is suddenly in more demand than it was, taking it out of circulation is a bigger imposition on society than it was before, so isn't it right that the tax on that goes up?

I'm still not sure it works. If I end up paying for your domain after a malicious move I coukd as well try to milk it out and may recover my cost by burning through your brand image. If I actually got more from it than expected, I'd rince and repeat making people's life miserable. Same way if an attacker got tesla.com by pushing enough, they might extract more value from it than a flailing Tesla could, and the customer base would be worse for it.

As a society I think we don't want to encourage adversarial pricing on taxes, the same way property tax isn't just based on raw demand (or even linked to it at all depending on the country) and has elements of controls to prevent too much gaming of it.

> I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take

You also have to eat the increased tax going forward. Which could be spent on eg universal healthcare.

I know of no truly serious offers for the domain, but why should that matter? I'm pretty sure residences aren't taxed based on un-accepted offers, for example.

Residences are taxed based on appraised market value; I think offers made can be taken into account on that? If not then they should be.

At least where I live (California US), that's not true. There are certain things which trigger a change in taxable value, but they're mostly only indirectly connected to appraised value. Un-accepted offers 100% definitely don't factor in and (for reasons already argued by others on this discussion) would probably cause more problems than they would solve if they _were_ taken into account.

California's property tax system is notoriously terrible and a significant contributor to the housing crisis in that state.

You're probably thinking of Prop 13, which, no argument. But I don't think the fix is as straightforward as you imply. (TLDR the biggest problems are due to corporate landowners, not families who own a single dwelling.)

Also, what jurisdiction are you aware of that takes un-accepted real estate offers into account for tax purposes?

My background is Ireland, where there's a general requirement to self-assess an accurate value; you're not specifically required to take offers into account but you're not required to ignore them either, it's more of a "you should assess all the information available and come up with an accurate valuation" type law, with the specifics being left to interpretation. https://www.revenue.ie/en/property/local-property-tax/valuin... has a bit about the process.

You'd have an assessor compare it against domains that had traded recently (someone else mentioned beer.com), perhaps ask interested buyers to give a quote.

Are you proposing every domain name registrant pay for an annual appraisal, whether or not they are planning on selling?

A tax is usually a percentage or income but my definition it need not be. It can be a flat tax. Or a tax on an assessed value, like a property tax.

I think the idea is if you tax people ~$1k/year/.com domain or 5% of the assessed value then you have fewer domain squatters and fewer stagnant domains. I guess students, hobbyists, etc. would then have to move to a corporate entity like GitHub Pages, Netlify, etc.

A tax on assets resuces some problems but creates others.

Thanks for the explanation.

I get the feeling it would be problematic for situations like one day Tesla getting bankrupted and would not able to keep paying a gigantic tax for tesla.com, when cars are still using it to check for updates or DRM access, and customers still go there to get support.

IMHO the domain tax having nothing to do with the value extracted from it doesn't fit with what we the role we give domains in our current world (which is also a reason why domains are so important)

In what way is he actually speculating or rent seeking? He has a real website on it — not just a placeholder — and he's got DNS MX records, so it's presumably actively used for email.

The website is just saying "make me a high offer", that seems like 100% speculation?

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