The Value of Milk.com(milk.com) |
The Value of Milk.com(milk.com) |
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.
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?
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.
Problem is, startups rarely have $10M to spend on a domain name. Give it a decade, one of them will probably bite.
... is that there is no problem. They're just being silly.
/s … I hope.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_..., Beer.com sold for 7M in 2004.
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.
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?
See also, the VC investment model that relies on the 1% breakout success covering losses on the remaining 99%.
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".
(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!)
I Got Milk.com (2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591357
Not for Sale (2013)
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.
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.
Their presentation is a little better though.
Those were the days.
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.
We could use the money to reduce our national debt, or pay for things like healthcare and education.
I think the idea is if you tax people ~$1k/year/.com domain or 5% of the assessed value then you have fewer domain squatters and fewer stagnant domains. I guess students, hobbyists, etc. would then have to move to a corporate entity like GitHub Pages, Netlify, etc.
A tax on assets resuces some problems but creates others.
I get the feeling it would be problematic for situations like one day Tesla getting bankrupted and would not able to keep paying a gigantic tax for tesla.com, when cars are still using it to check for updates or DRM access, and customers still go there to get support.
IMHO the domain tax having nothing to do with the value extracted from it doesn't fit with what we the role we give domains in our current world (which is also a reason why domains are so important)
(Not that I necessarily support a Georgist tax in this case, since it seems that your interest in the domain is noncommercial in nature)
E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ 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?
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.
You also have to eat the increased tax going forward. Which could be spent on eg universal healthcare.
Also, what jurisdiction are you aware of that takes un-accepted real estate offers into account for tax purposes?