MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Milk.com - now that sounds like it would be the place online - the place - to learn about dairy, right? Nope. It is a personal website owned by one guy and a bit of a time machine. Here's Alex Mayyasi from our Planet Money team with this story.
ALEX MAYYASI, BYLINE: Dan Bornstein says he got milk.com back in 1994 based on a nickname his coworker gave him.
DAN BORNSTEIN: He knew that, like, I happened to like chocolate milk, you know? And so he started calling me Milk Boy. And I'm like - I resented it a little bit, but then I sort of decided, OK, I'm just going to own it.
MAYYASI: The site is a vision of the web stuck in time. It's mostly text, fuzzy graphics, links to recipes and personal projects and a link that says, not for sale, then a shockingly high price tag.
There's a link on your website that says you will sell it if someone shows up with $10 million. I mean, are you just waiting for a big enough bag of money?
BORNSTEIN: You know, that is what a lot of people have - it's a reasonable question. There is a price, but it's, like, I'm not trying to get it. I just want to live my life (laughter).
MAYYASI: Dan doesn't even truly know what his domain is worth. For these rare pieces of internet real estate, it's not like with houses. You can't easily check what your neighbors sold for last year, which creates a business opportunity for someone like Rob Schutz.
ROB SCHUTZ: There's a million companies that use milk or milk street or milk movement or milk and honey that, like, would want to consolidate down to just milk. So there are lots of people that would want this.
MAYYASI: Rob is like a real estate agent but for domain names. So I asked him, how much could milk.com sell for?
SCHUTZ: I'd say anywhere from mid-six figures and up.
MAYYASI: So maybe not $10 million, but memorable one-word domains, like milk.com, are rare, and that makes them really valuable to companies. Economists call this costly signaling. It's like when you see a Super Bowl ad. You assume that company must be pretty successful if they can pay for Super Bowl ads. Take the startup Doorbot. They made video doorbells. Back in 2013, they were struggling. But then they spent a million dollars on a domain name, ring.com, and made it the new name of their company. In 2018, Amazon bought Ring for nearly a billion dollars. The company's founder said their new domain name was a really important part of the turnaround.
SCHUTZ: You talk to some founders and they think it makes a tremendous difference, right? From a legitimacy, reputation standpoint, if you have that one-word.com, you're a real company.
MAYYASI: Chocolate.com apparently sold for over a million dollars. Last year, Rocket Mortgage bought rocket.com for a reported $14 million, and ChatGPT bought chat.com for more than $10 million. So as more of these domains get bought up, like real estate in a historic city center, sites like milk.com get a little rarer and maybe a little more valuable if Dan ever decides to sell.
For NPR News, I'm Alex Mayyasi.
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