11–20 of 73 posts
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.
It is the exact same situation with beer.com Their presentation is a little better though.
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.
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 h…
See also, the VC investment model that relies on the 1% breakout success covering losses on the remaining 99%.
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.
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 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".
Per Henry George we should tax this kind of speculation and rent seeking, by taxing things like land and internet domains. We could use the money to reduce our national debt, or pay for things like healthcare and education.
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 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.
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.