The million-dollar mystery of milk.com | Hacker News Reader

The million-dollar mystery of milk.com

thehustle.co

34 pointsAnon8433 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34281453

DonHopkins on Jan 6, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Dwarf Fortress has sold half a million copies

It reminds me of Justin Hall's story about holding out and refusing to sell "bud.com" to Budweiser.

Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.

He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.

https://bud.com

https://bud.com/history-of-bud-com/

>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.

>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”

>Actually I graduated the year before.

>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”

>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.

>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.

The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:

https://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.html

An example of a premium domain that confuses me is diy.com. Owned by B&Q. Sure it's a good vanity flex but at the cost of your brand name?

The same brand predicament must be true of whatever prospects milk.com has.

I appreciate that beardsandhats.com redirects to bhphotovideo.com :)

This triggered following a shallow rabbit hole through their history. It's a nice double meaning to incorporate their initials (Blimie & Herman) and heritage in one brand name.

B&Q used to (maybe still do) run lorries up the motorway with the two-line legend: "www.diy.com. Shop online NOW".

Now? I'm literally driving. I'll end up ploughing into the back of your lorry if I shop online now.

It feels like every ad has to end with "NOW!" or "TODAY!". Yes I understand how big research results give the marketing people good reason to insist on it, but it drives me nuts! I do wonder whether its overuse might diminish its supposed effect.

But your passenger is not driving ;)

since they can't have their brand's ampersand in a domain it seems better than the alternative: bandq, which isn't correct either.

interestingly bq.co.uk redirects to diy.com though that doesn't mean they own it

Famously, B&Q’s original name was “Block and Quayle” after the surnames of the founders - but they switched to B&Q because everyone in the trade were abbreviating it that way.

> In the years since, websites have been described as “dead” due to TikTok, YouTube, and Google monopolizing attention and keeping users within their ecosystems.

A bit of an overstatement but rings kind of true. I feel the number of different website we browse through decrease over time, it is all centered around giant walled gardens. You'd rather have lots of followers on Tiktok or Youtube for exposure rather than having a nice domain name

I disagree with your last sentence. As someone who runs a few online businesses, the goal is to move the traffic from the walled garden directly to the domain as much as possible. TikTok, Google, Facebook and all the rest can derank or ban you with no reason at all at any moment, imploding your business overnight. It presents an untenable level of risk that I think a lot of people overlook. For that reason, a strong domain remains extremely important.

Not as much experience as you, but do people really care about what the domain name is as long as it does not look obviously scammy? People click links or CTAs but would rarely actually type the domain. Agree it's important to move business away from the big platforms. I know lots of brands are moving their product away from marketplaces.

"Strong domain" != "Strong domain name"

Domain ranking is more about reputation than exactly what the TLD is. Good TLD helps for sure, but is not the end all be all. Age, backlinks, content, etc. are the real ranking factors.

Of curse that's true.

That's your goal as a service provider, not as a consumer.

The "Global internet users" graphic near the bottom of the article is an impressively bad example of what Edward Tufte called "chatjunk". Not only is it visually pretty awful, it's really hard to tell where the data points are supposed to be. (The surface of the "piles o' desktop computers"? The top of the hominid heads? The neck of each hominid?) And I like how the vertical axis apparently starts at minus one billion users, suggesting that shortly prior to 2005, there was a point where there were negative one billion users.

I know that you probably mean "chartjunk", but I do like the idea of "chatjunk".

Yes, I did mean "chartjunk", but I agree with you ;-).

That register banner without a close button and the over use of the wheat field metaphor added an annoying aspect to what would other wise be a nice, little old internet story

The domain worth nothing, you can literally list any numbers, but no one will buy it, because its too generic, and no usage for either a business, or a personal brand, you like milk? No problem, keep it till forever.

There's a lot of generic short domains that got sold for a lot of money, so not really sure what made you comment that.

Does it matter? He clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. That domain would easily sell in a day for over $1M if he were willing to sell it.

he said he's consider a 1 order magnitude greater than that.

It would be ideal for large new social platform (like Reddit or Twitter). Easy to type and pronounce, short. Probably not trademarked or copyrighted either.

such one word domain would easily go for ~3k on open market.

For 3k I'd buy it tomorrow, but it'll be mostly in the millions: https://jamesnames.com/guide/one-word-sales/

short dictionary domains are memorable and easy to type. this alone makes them valuable for branding purposes. Imainge creating a dating app. Telling people to go to "date.com" would sure be easier than "newdatatingapp.com"

This was like the early bitcoin. Imagine in the early to mid '90s snapping up all the short and memorable/dictionary dotcom names.

Wasn’t milk.com the website for the super-fancy electric-powered White Table during the 2010s?

proof that dan is less grifter and more coder: https://github.com/danfuzz

also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)

I worked with Danfuzz on ScriptX at Kaleida Labs from 1993-1996. Yes, he's a great programmer!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40417009

>Kaleida Labs (a joint venture of Apple and IBM) developed ScriptX, which was a cousin of Dylan: a lisp-like language with a "normal" syntax without all the parens, with a CLOS-like (without all the MOOP stuff) object system with generic dispatch, multiple inheritance, proxies, and a "Bento" persistence system (from OpenDoc), and container and multimedia libraries that leaned heavily into multiple inheritance. (You'd typically mix arrays or dicts into your collections of other kinds of objects. So you could directly loop over, filter, and collect your custom classes.)

>Its parser was a separate layer from its compiler, so Dan Bornstein (one of the ScriptX designers who later made Dalvik for Android) write a Scheme parser front end for it.

>ScriptX influenced MaxScript, the scripting language in 3D Studio Max, which was written by one of the ScriptX designers, John Wainwright. Other Kaleidan Lisp hackers include Shell Kaplan (Employee #1 at Amazon) and Eric Benson (who worked on Lucid Emacs), both went to Amazon and did a lot of Lisp and Lisp inspired stuff there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX

He scanned the letter about the "Bruce Font" -- The Artist Formerly Known as Prince's own font distributed around the "CDROM Industry" on a floppy disk in 1993 by his PR company "Graphix Zone":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821030

>Funny, I thought the symbol for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was informally pronounced and spelled "BRUCE", which is less cumbersome to speak and spell than the official alternative (which is unspeakable unspellable silence). His PR company sent this memorandum around to the press and industry, including step-by-step downloading, installation, and usage instructions for Macintosh and PC, of a special [BRUCE] font with just one unpronounceable [BRUCE] symbol, to be used when referring to The Artist in print. I guess Weird Al didn't get the memo.

https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html

>Why, the ``Bruce'' font? Because someone jokingly suggested that because it was way too cumbersome to say, ``that symbol guy'' or whatever, it'd be much easier to give the symbol a name, and that name should be ``Bruce.'' So there.

Somebody finally dug up a copy of the floppy:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/04/princes-legendary-fl...

https://web.archive.org/web/20160605114246/https://www.anild...

https://x.com/anildash/status/481211515630936067

https://hackaday.com/2021/11/23/cracking-open-the-prince-flo...

This is what the Internet ought to be. Hang on for dear life

Reply on news.ycombinator.com