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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

I think he’s aiming a bit high with 10 milly. I’d take 1 or 5.

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...

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.

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.

Which actually makes sense. If it's not coming from a mammal's mammary glands, it's not milk!

Calling it milk IS deceptive marketing.

they'd not be calling their product milk, it would just be the name of their domain. you don't buy amazons at amazon.com

It’s affected by how Google currently ranks the plain domain name in a search. It used to be higher than it is now, but it still has got a lot of weight

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.

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.

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.

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/

This is why you're not a CEO. You would fail to extract maximal shareholder value.

If you listen to the podcast, if I recall correctly, he said he’d consider numbers higher than 1m.

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