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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I 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.
Edit: Please, keep editing your posts. And also deleting your other crummy response about me being "attention seeking". Really not sure why you feel the need to continue to be an asshole.
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.
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.
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 ~$1k/year/.com domain or 5% of the assessed value then you have fewer domain squatters and fewer stagnant domains. I guess students, hobbyists, etc. would then have to move to a corporate entity like GitHub Pages, Netlify, etc.
A tax on assets resuces some problems but creates others.
I get the feeling it would be problematic for situations like one day Tesla getting bankrupted and would not able to keep paying a gigantic tax for tesla.com, when cars are still using it to check for updates or DRM access, and customers still go there to get support.
IMHO the domain tax having nothing to do with the value extracted from it doesn't fit with what we the role we give domains in our current world (which is also a reason why domains are so important)
Wouldn't that allow random people to increase your tax on domains you obviously don't want to sell ?
E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ 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.
> 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.
"Someone might get angry about this tax and do something malicious" is an argument you can make about any kind of tax.
We already have to deal with people squatting domains, and we have laws about trademarks, libel and so on. A tax on valuable domains ought to reduce domain squatting (since it makes it harder to just hold a domain that you're not using, you'd be paying every year) and reduce the market price of domains, which would increase competition and be good for customers. If someone manages to make a viable business out of buying up domains whose owners have been lowballing their value to keep their taxes low, fair play to them, they'll be helping keep everyone honest and keep domains in circulation in the market (but notice that a business like that is only going to be viable if they can sell the domains on to someone who can actually use them pretty quickly, because every year that they're holding them in inventory they're paying the taxes themselves).
> 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.
The current property tax regime is exactly the kind of failure I want to avoid; those "controls" are what leads to all the gaming that locks up our property market and means young people have no hope of ever owning anything. A more raw market-based system would be fairer and more effective.
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.
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.
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.
No, I'm envisioning something like the property tax system - the state assessor tells you a number, you can accept that, informally discuss it with them, or make a formal appeal. Which, yes, might mean legal costs, but presumably only in cases where it was assessed to be worth a lot, in which case either you really are that wealthy and can afford the assessment, or you always have the option of ceding it to the state at the price they've assessed.
People pay registration fees every year for domains. How is what you propose different than registrars setting different fees for different domains? Or: What entity should be entitled to the tax, and why?
> How is what you propose different than registrars setting different fees for different domains?
Under what I propose, people using or squatting a popular domain that lots of people want would pay more, and people using an obscure domain no-one cares about would pay less. That would be more equitable.
> Or: What entity should be entitled to the tax, and why?
It's a Pigovian tax, so it has a positive effect even if you burn the proceeds. In an imaginary ideal world I'd put them in a kind of sovereign wealth fund for all humanity, that every natural person was equally entitled to, because no-one owns the word "milk" and everyone on Earth (other than the one person who does get to use the domain) is equally deprived by not being able to use the domain for their own website. In practice, using it to run internet infrastructure or putting it into general UN/government coffers would be fine.
Just to be clear, do you believe milk.com is being squatted on right now? Should its registrant morally pay more than the default annual registration cost?
If so: How does consistently using a domain (any domain) for literally 30 years (as of a week ago) for a personal website and an email address constitute "squatting?"
Please note that there is a significant time cost (both senses) switching one's email address. Speaking personally, I have found some organizations are effectively incapable of updating an email address in their systems, at least not on the first N attempts over the course of M years.
> Just to be clear, do you believe milk.com is being squatted on right now?
I probably wouldn't call it squatting, but it's something economically similar.
> Should its registrant morally pay more than the default annual registration cost?
Yes.
> If so: How does consistently using a domain (any domain) for literally 30 years (as of a week ago) for a personal website and an email address constitute "squatting?"
If someone's using a highly-in-demand domain for a small website visited only by friends and one email address, then I see that as wasteful and icky. It's like having a /8 IP block because you registered in the early days of the internet, and using it for your home network of 5 computers. Or having a giant mansion in the middle of town where you live in a couple of rooms and leave the rest to rot. Or owning a bunch of historic paintings/cars/etc. that sit permanently in storage and are never used or seen. More "hoarding" than "squatting" I guess, but equally gross.
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.