Not for sale
milk.com
milk.com
Moo!
1) He tries to expertly avoid having to give a solid number, but then he comes right out and says he'd take 10mm for it. Sweet negotiation skills.
2) The best company he could come up with to buy the domain does just 110mm in revenue, nevermind profits. There are a few billion dollar companies who might bite, but any company making less probably couldnt afford it.
Of course, he has a great domain name and he is well within his rights to ask whatever he wants for it. But to imply it's affordable without having any factual data to back that up is a bit much.
1) he owns a very good four-letters dot com while you don't.
Obviously, economics is about what the buyer is willing to pay, but it feels wrong for someone whose only contribution to the property was to register it early on to attempt to sell it for $10 million.
He's not going to get that much money for it. Ever. And yet he put up that page, either to satisfy his need to make a public point, or as a very conscious attempt to start negotiations and still manage the volume of requests he might get.
In the case of squatting on a domain, you are depriving someone of the productive use of that domain, while also trying to extort large sums of money simply for the ability to rent it. Of course generally when this happens, it involves a shady company that also seeds the site with loads of sketchy ads.
He's using the domain, not holding it for ransom. Quite frankly, I don't think the web will be any poorer for having one less corporate media experience, especially from an industry that everyone already knows about. If they want a big glitzy advertising website, I'm sure Google will index it properly, no matter it's domain name. As for the owner of milk.com? He's put actual content up. Useful things. Interesting things. Things that took time to create and curate. This is not the M.O. of some squatter looking to make a quick buck. Especially with the whole "waiting for more than ten years" part.
Back when many of these domains were acquired the investment was either $70 or $100 (or $0) depending on the year acquired.
Do you think it was so obvious that that $100 investment (for 2 years reg with NSI) was a sure bet? Guess what, it wasn't. It was a gamble or people would have bet everything they had to acquire as many names as they could.
Explain to me why buying a share of stock at $100 and risking $100 is different than thinking a domain might be valuable and risking $100 on that?
And what do you mean "depriving someone of the productive use of that domain"? What if the domain was owned by some small nobody on Main Street who didn't want to sell? Or Warren Buffet? Who do you think is going to determine what the best use of a domain is exactly?
Well, if I have a company that, I don't know, sells milk, well I may just have a use for that domain in promoting my product. Maybe I have some startup that deals in milk. That would be a good domain to have. But unfortunately I cannot use that domain to host my website, or web application. Someone decided to lease that domain for what is likely a measly $20 USD per year, and thinks a reasonable price to transfer that lease to me is about $10.000.000 USD.
Instead this fine gentleman decided to purchase the domain and thinks acting like a child on a playground by going "Nanananana, you can't have it".
So what? I can drive around my neighborhood and somebody might have beat me to the last breakfast sandwich at the Starbucks and they might take one bite and throw it away. The world doesn't work by the fact that you or anyone might have a use for something better than someone else. You pay the money, you buy something, you decide what you want to do with it.
I think what you don't understand is that there is a business model built around buying and selling domains. And there is nothing wrong with doing this even though it upsets many people who just think "it's not fair!".
With your hypothetical company that wants that domain what happens if what you are doing with it (for your "little" store) doesn't match up to some big dairy when they think they should have it. Are you going to just give it to them or would you try to make money? More importantly you seem to assume that "milk.com" would be available right when you want it. The truth is the owner could have sold it years ago to someone for $5,000 that is using it for something and then you wouldn't get it anyway.
I'd like to say that I agree that he, for lack of a better way to put it, is being "a dick". But the truth is that's actually good if you want to buy it because it will scare many people away who could buy the domain in the past who believe his (what I feel is) false bravado.
"there is nothing wrong with doing this"
Of course in the case where someone has a domain infringing on another's trademark, that is in fact very wrong and can lead to legal problems.
Someone contacted me about it. I don't know even what he's going to use it for, but he seems to like the name. I pulled a good 4 figure number out of my head. I never though he'll pay that much.
Indeed, we made the transaction pretty quickly in the same week. I was planning to drop the domain!
Domain names have gone for as much or more. Milk is a huge industry. There's no reason "he's not going to get that much money for it. Ever."
Since he put next to no money into it, keeping it as an amusement (an exercise in F-U money as others have noted), is a suitable payoff for him. Insofar as it may be worth a lot to someone, he's warding off uninteresting offers.
Upshot: it's his, he can do what he wants with it, and he is. Funny how much consternation this is causing.
It all comes down to how neutrual the judges are and if they see their next paycheck coming indirectly from a corporate entity (ie. funding wipo).
Successful UDRP requests usually mean the current owner is using the name in bad faith.
The usual explanation is if an apple orchard which has been in business for 50 years had bought the domain apple.com, then it would be considered entirely reasonable for them to keep it - even if their business was not called Apple. Whereas if an electronics form founded a few weeks tried to do the same thing, they would lose it.
I'm not aware of any outrageously bad decisions in this area. It seems to be quite sensible.
The title is taken from the link near the bottom at http://milk.com/
So, it is in a sense the original, correct title. If you really want to know whether the domain is actually for sale or not, ask the owner.
If you want something that's quick and easy to adjudicate, I don't think you'll find much of an improvement.
If your goal was to reduce "producer surplus," you might use an annual auction system for each domain. The expensive domain purchasers could subsidize free domains for everyone else, with enough left over to... do... I dunno, wonderful things, I'm sure.
Aside from that, it's not obvious who should own domains where there are competing reasonable claims, certainly no general solution to the problem of "subjective fairness."
Squatting a domain on the other hand requires minimal effort and money, and there is no danger of losing the domain even if it is unused (or parked).
Additionally you would need a Norwegian company to get even a single one as well as be prepared to defend your connection to the domain. (Either something related to the company name or a product you are promoting.) This has worked reasonably well so far.
Of course the most interesting ones got grabbed pretty early anyway I guess. (say.no is my personal favorite)
Maybe interesting: One decision that left me wondering was when Sony was given the domain playstation3.no a few years ago even if the retailer was a know Sony Playstation reseller. Then again I'm no lawyer.
Is there any basis for saying this? With the recent moves by ICANN to allow more TLDs (including corporate ones), surely the value of .com is being diluted? My feeling is that consumers are so used to weird domains at this point that nobody really cares about particular domains. Is having milk.com rather than johnsdairy.com really advantageous to a company?
Color seems to have been a disasterous excercise in spending other peoples money from the beginning, so it's probably a poor example for sensible business practice.
I'd love to see some research indicating this is true. While I certainly am used to "weird domains", I still often default to .com when trying to find things. If I want to look at Ford's current line-up, my first instinct would be to try ford.com.
Of course, that fails spectacularly when searching for Nissan cars.
I think there's a certain generational divide at play. If you have only really used browsers with universal search in the address bar, and you've only lived in a time in which the web is commonplace, your attitudes and habits are likely to be quite different. When I first started using the web you had to put the full and correct domain and protocol. Search bars didn't even exist. Habits die hard.
I'm not actually sure if we're disagreeing. Ford only means cars because Henry Ford started a car company. The argument for valuable domains (like milk.com) is that the simple "Milk" brand is more valuable than building your brand around a unique name. Consumers don't care that google is at google.com and not search.com.
I think to some extent when the internet emerged, people transferred the trademark way of thinking into the internet domain. The first dotcom bubble was defined by people pouring money into something they didn't understand. That included spending outrageous amounts on generic simple domains when in fact, time showed that if you had a valid product (eg google, reddit, flickr) you didn't need a simple expensive name to get widespread recognition. Search completely sidelined the strategy that investors were going for - that if someone was looking for something online they'd first try "buy.com" or "pets.com".
And if I had, you can bet I'd be milking it for everything I could.
> Site copyright © 1994–2012 Dan Bornstein, all rights reserved.
Sometimes it's just best to keep the domains you like and wait until you have the time to start a project.
This makes you nothing more than a domain squatter.
I have no idea about the milk business, especially not its promotion. But I would imagine that few people would not spend as much money on milk because this organisation does not own the domain 'milk.com'.
It's more likely to be bought by a corporate wanting a pretty memorable domain.
He has a good job and doesn't care much for money.
In other words, he has enough fuck you money to say "fuck you", and that's exactly what he's doing.
Wanna own this very cool four-letters dot com? You can't because he's giving you the finger.
Well... You could, but you'd have to fork out at least $10 million.
At which point he's pretty much still giving you the finger.
And have made money doing this.
The domains I have purchased have mainly been for others so I have a good idea of the "mentality" of a domain seller.
In addition by being an owner I get approached by plenty of people who want to buy a domain that I own. I have seen every single approach out there on the buy side multiple times.
As far as "not needing to sell" the only 2 times I ever failed to buy a domain (for a client) was a domain that google owned where I was not able to buy that domain for a client. I even tried to trade them domains that I owned that they might need. And I was talking to the "right" people at google (high up contact referred by a well known person at google.) They carefully considered and then decided they weren't interested and would keep the domain that I needed. I used this strategy because obviously I quickly recognized that money was not going to make the deal (google doesn't need the money) which is why I went the route of a trade and it actually almost worked (where "almost" means they considered making a trade and took some time to ponder and pass around the domains I offered for any projects in the pipeline.) The other time was a domain that was owned by a Fortune 500 non-profit that a chinese buyer wanted. I was the go between. The non-profit didn't want to sell (buyer was willing to pay $50,000 nothing to sneeze at and the domain was not that valuable and well worth it to sell at that price). They buyer came to me because they had bought another domains from me and thought I could help them get this name. I still feel I had an angle to get the domain from them but the client didn't want to pay more money to try that angle. (Bonus points to anyone who can figure out that angle it's not a legal angle by the way.)
No matter what this seller tries to feign my belief is there is a weak point that would make him sell for way way less than 10,000,000 which of course is absurd for this domain. There aren't many buyers for this domain at even a $500k value. He may say he does not need the money but more than likely he is what I call the "lottery ticket" mentality where he is hoping that some big fish comes along and buys the domain for millions. While that could happen and he could be proven correct I don't think that will happen based on my 17 years of experience doing this.
The other thing is he is trying to hard to justify why he won't sell the domain and isn't interested. Shakespear comes to mind. As someone who owns plenty of domains I know exactly how many inquiries someone gets when they own a "good" short domain. Guess what? You don't get that many inquiries to be annoyed when you own 1 or even 10 domains.
I could write a book on this obviously but the way to approach (a seller like this) is not to send an email but to dangle a formal offer in front of him with a deadline and see what he says then. Or I might get into a plane and fly out and try to casually meet him to determine what makes him tick or uncover some other info about him that will help me buy the domain (which could be 6 mos. later so the events aren't tied together).
The strategies that are used are unique and sometimes they are made up on the fly depending on hunches that I have. And creativity is a must.
A recent deal I did was a domain where both the buyer (my client) and the seller agreed to a price ($60,000) and both were happy. I perceived to much eagerness on the part of the seller (the tempo of his replies and his voice on the phone) and as a result managed to get him to lower his price by another $4,000 which almost covered my entire fee. All this w/o the buyer even knowing about it. (I did the entire deal from the start and the start price was $200k and it's a pretty good name actually.)
It would be hard to put in words why I decided to take that chance along with the risks etc. (And it didn't put any more money in my pocket I did it just for the fun of following my hunch).
On the sell side I once raised a price by $50,000 merely hearing the buyers voice over the phone. That said almost all deals are done by email not in person and not over the phone. (See if you can guess why I prefer to do it like that.)
This is all psychology and pattern matching and I've been doing it for many years (as well as with things that have nothing to do with domains at all) I've never read a book on it and I wouldn't do that because it would mess up my instincts.
I also do work for VC's and angels acquiring domains and I've helped plenty of people for free (but can't really do that because it's very time consuming). Questions are always invited obviously.
Better he just come out and say it.