https://milk.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Milk_aquarium-102...
I think he’s aiming a bit high with 10 milly. I’d take 1 or 5.
Agree that $10M is too high, but you have to drop your anchor somewhere.
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...
Calling it milk IS deceptive marketing.
It’s his and he can do what he wants. In fact I think it’s cool that there’s still a Classic Web holdout like this. But there’s latent joy locked away in that url.
He offered a 1544 Dante, which I accepted. His gig was auctioning estates and his wife imported and sold wicker.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple...
https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple...
I just checked now and it's one of those mattress drop-shipping sites :-(
Back in the internet's early days, it was easy to get a domain name. They were cheap or even free.
I'm going by ancient memory here and would love it if someone corrects me.
From my point of view at the time, companies like NameZero and Xoom were Johnny-come-lately scumbags in danger of destroying the internet through their flagrant disregard for its culture and traditions. Looters. And, from today's perspective, I'm not sure I was wrong.
NameZero was from 01999 evidently: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namezero
I never met anyone else in person in the 90s who also used the internet
When I joined a couple other guys working to build the southeast US's fastest growing ISP in early mid-90s, enough mom and pops, small businesses, and government agencies -- from backyard bird feeder webcams to US Navy recruiting -- were already staking their brochureware claims that it was worth marketing ourselves as offering FrontPage hosting.
Windows 95 already took you online fine, while Windows 98SE bundled IE 5 which included the first version of XMLHttpRequest, giving birth to Ajax, enabling single page apps... and of course e-commerce in ad banners.
By the time you are calling the early Internet, everyone called it Web 2.0, and most things are still that.
Interestingly, I met tons of teens from rural UK in early 90s online, in MUDs and MOOs and especially Talkers such as Surfers: https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Surfers (Small world, several went on to found or lead top web 2.0 digital agencies.). As a sibling comment notes, most were at uni.
By that time, the early 90s, it was then considered the end of the early Internet, beginning of mainstreaming. US law changed to allow making money online, Web 1.0 got its footing, and most of all, it was the start of Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
By the mid to late 90s (my own earliest domain) yes. But a quick whois on milk.com shows a creation date of 1985-01-01, and that dates back to basically the foundation of DNS at all, RFC 882 & 883 were 1983. Initially it was just the Stanford Research Institute manually maintaining HOSTS.TXT for arpanet. IIRC you like, literally called up Elizbeth Feinler during business hours and just asked and that was it. This is all second hand because I was just a wee lad at that point and wouldn't even discover BBS until well after that heady era!
As things got formalized yeah unfortunately some players were able to start grabbing at monopolies, and NetSol began operating the registry for DISA in I think 91 or 92? It was still initially free, but then pretty quickly they started commercializing. But if someone got in truly on the ground floor it was pretty informal, academic and free. Getting a block of IPv4 was pretty easy/free for a long while into the 90s as well.
Shortly after that they started charging, and I hadn't carried out my plans with it, so I let it go, figuring that someone else would make better use of it.
They didn't.
rs.internic.net, if memory serves. It stopped redirecting to anything some years ago.
¹ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million...
vitalnodo•5mo ago