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Follow NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts. This is Planet Money from NPR. So, Jeff, last year I stumbled across a kind of mystery that you and I have been talking a lot about. Oh, yeah, Alex, you have been obsessed with this.
It is about this website called Milk.com. Actually, let's just blow it up. Right, so I'm going to type in Milk.com and it's pretty basic looking. It's black and white, not many images, mostly text.
And the homepage says something about a lactose pipeline. Yeah, apparently this is just a personal website run by a guy named Dan Bornstein. He's got his resume up there and also a page where he puts up his favorite recipes. Like he seems to be a fan of a dessert called cornmeal froggies.
Whatever those might be, but my favorite part of the site is the FAQ. Oh, yeah, right, right. So, like question is Milk.com a commercial internet service provider? Answer, new question.
How much does an ad cost on Milk.com? Answer, new. Does Milk.com have any ties to the dairy industry whatsoever? Answer, new.
Like you do what was coming. The answer to every question we had many questions, the answer was always new. Move all the way down. Right.
And so the big question, the big mystery here is that this guy Dan seems to be sitting on some pretty valuable internet real estate. You look at other domain names like chocolate.com and 2019, that apparently sold for over a million dollars or even bagels.com. That sold for $500,000 last year. Exactly.
This is why I've been so obsessed. When I see Milk.com, it feels like walking through downtown Manhattan. There are skyscrapers everywhere, corporate headquarters here, Gucci store over there. And then I see a little shack.
Milk.com is that shack. What is the deal with Milk.com? Why didn't a developer buy that shack to polish it and build a high-rock? Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Jeff Guo. And I'm Alex Massey. So, if chocolate.com and bagels.com are worth so much, why is Milk.com just sitting there? Why is someone using something so valuable to boost his resume and favorite recipes?
Today on the show, we dive into the world of internet real estate, where investors gamble on the value of everyday words, and we chase down the owner of Milk.com. Find out in this day and age, what is a domain name actually worth? To understand the world of domain names, we called up Rob Shuts. He's like a real estate agent, but for domain names.
And he says a lot of his clients are surprised at how much they can go for. So, you'll have really smart, really accomplished people who've done a lot. And then they come into this world and they're like, I would pay $50,000 for this thing. You're like, that's a $10 million domain name.
And they're like, what? They're like, what are you talking about? Rob works with companies to find the right home on the internet for their businesses. He's helped his clients buy more than a thousand domains in the last couple years.
And Rob says, if you want a premium domain name, you are going to have to pay up. I'm not kidding. There are massive deals that happen behind the scenes. Voice.com sold for $30 million a year ago.
Rocket Mortgage bought Rocket.com within the last 12 months, I think for $16 million. So these are incredibly valuable assets. To be clear, most domain names are not that valuable. You can go register one for under like a hundred bucks.
For instance, Alex, you are currently writing the Planet Money book coming out next spring. And I just checked Planet Money at thebook.com is still available. Okay. Interesting.
Okay. But you get the point, right? In theory, there are an infinite number of domain names out there. Over the years, we've also created all these alternatives to the plain old dot com, like dot biz and dot AI and even dot horse.
Okay. But Rob says, mostly the people coming to him really want a dot com and the really valuable dot coms, they fall into two categories. The first one, it comes from the early days of the internet. There's keyword domain names.
So someone's like, buy shoes online dot com, right? That's something that traditionally you could build any really solid SEO presence around. You can rank highly on for Google. Someone types of buy shoes online.
You might show first, you get a lot of free traffic. Rob says a great keyword domain name can fetch like six or even seven figures these days. But the market is changing. Yeah.
Today, people use the internet by opening apps or searching on Google or asking AI and they're not usually googling by shoes online. They're just going to Nike dot com. There's a shift that has started right with the way the people are searching for things where you're seeing less demand on keyword domains that you may have in the past. Instead, there's now more and more demand for what are called brandable domains, like some of Rob's clients are new startups.
So new that they might not have a name yet. And they come to him looking for a short and memorable domain that they can build their business around. So something you can call your company, zoom.com, you know, apple.com, Oracle.com. Those are increasing value.
It just has to be a good word. But there are limited number of good words out there. We talk about the radio test too. Like you said the domain on the radio and you say visit field.com, you know, for all of your needs visit field.com.
How's that spell? Is it F I L is a pH I L Rob says, sometimes the right domain name, believe it or not, can make your company. There is the story that people in the business like to tell about this struggling startup called Doorbot. They went on Shark Tank, raise zero dollars.
But then with the last of their money, they bought this super short, super premium domain name paid a million dollars for it, made it the new name of their company. You have probably heard of this company. They make video doorbells. Their website is ring.com in 2018 Amazon bought ring for nearly a billion dollars.
And okay, how much did the ring.com name really matter for that? The founder of the company at least has said that it was a really important part of the turnaround. And a lot of companies that Rob works with, they are looking for their own ring.com story. They are looking for a domain name that sounds like the name of a billion dollar company.
Other companies come to Rob looking to upgrade their domain name. He recently helped a banking startup called slash they were using the website join slash.com. He helped them buy slash.com and it can seem like unimportant. I think if you're looking from the outside, you're like, why does that really matter?
Right? Joy slash versus slash. Does that really make a difference? 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. And okay, maybe some of this is also just vanity. But there is a reason beyond vanity that a company might want to drop millions of dollars on a domain name. Yeah, and economics, the term for this is 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, you know, owning a super expensive domain name does the same thing. So we asked Rob how valuable he thought milk.com might be like, it's milk.com one of those coveted brandable domain names. He says, yeah, it is. It's four characters.
It's pronounceable. It is passes the radio tests. It has positive connotation. Rob says, there could be real demand for this domain name and not just from the dairy industry.
For instance, bread.com is not owned by Wonder Bread. It was bought by a finance company and a word like milk has a lot of potential. There's a million companies that use milk or just are called milk already 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, right?
It's just a matter of the budgets of line with what the seller's expectations are. Rob says he could easily see milk.com selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, even a million. But instead, it's just some guy's personal website. And the internet is actually full of examples like this.
Try going to happy.com or TV.com. These really premium internet addresses are just sitting vacant. Rob is often reaching out to the owners of these valuable domain names, trying to make them an offer. I've said people whiskey.
I've said woman flowers before just trying ways to get in front of people. I did get a response finally from this woman on the after a center of bouquet of flowers. She's still not interested in selling because she was very technical. Rob says that when he tracks down an owner, they usually fit into one of three categories.
Sometimes it's a big company. For instance, Proctor and Gamble has a lot of domains that it's not really doing anything with like dry.com or sense.com. But those big companies almost never sell. Sometimes it's a random individual or a small business who might be interested in selling or they might be too emotionally attached.
And then you have domain investors, people who buy domain names so they can resell them for a profit. We called up one of the biggest domain investors. My name is Rick Schwartz and I'm also known as the domain king. Rick was one of the first to make a name for himself, buying up and investing in domain names.
So people started calling me the domain king. And then one day I said, maybe I should register that domain name. Before he was the domain king, Rick owned kind of the precursor to domain names. 1-800 numbers.
People would call, enter their credit card info and pay by the minute. They were semi-adulted nature. They were more like chat lines like 1-800-SERLOV, 1-800-Makeout. Yeah.
And in the 90s, people were telling Rick that he had to check out this thing called the internet. So it's the next big thing. So Rick started buying up some keyword domains and started with ones that were, let's just say, not safe for work. I bought horny.com.
Okay. I'll have to say that, but I bought that domain, horny.com, for $40,000. Very quickly, Rick made a lot of money by redirecting traffic from his domains to other people's adult websites, basically renting them out. And in 2003, he sold one of his domains.
My first big sale was men.com. And you literally owned men.com. I owned men.com. And then I sold men.com for $1.32 million.
And it was big news. I mean, it was on CNN. It was on outlets all over the world and newspapers. It was a big deal with that time.
Over the years, Rick has made millions selling and renting domain names. Right now he owns about 7,000. He thinks of them like an investment portfolio. And his portfolio isn't just adult themed domains.
He owns domains like banker.com and trade shows.com and delivering.com. Most of these domains are just empty. Rick gets offers for them all the time, but he rejects almost all of them. Let me tell you something.
The most important, the most powerful word in this whole English language or any other language is two letters. It's called no. No. No.
You have to learn how to say no. When's the last time you said no to like a really big offer? I think I got one last week for seven figures on something, but I wasn't even something to consider. Yeah, someone offered Rick $1 million for one of his domains.
And Rick didn't even consider it. Why are you just holding on to it? Why aren't you selling it? Because I'm not going to undervalue my own stuff.
Listen, if you have 100 Ferraris in your garage, you're going to sell them for $1,000 each? Or you're going to wait for the guy that says, oh, I'm a guy that loves Ferraris. I know the value of a Ferrari. And that's the guy I'm going to meet.
Rick is the type of domain investor who is waiting for a whale of an offer. And in a perfectly functioning market, you probably wouldn't see so many ricks out there sitting on undeveloped pieces of prime internet real estate. But the market for domain names is kind of weird. For one, it doesn't cost very much to hold onto a domain name.
You just have to pay the renewal fees, which are around $10 to $100 a year. So people like Rick, they are happy to sit back and wait for years for the perfect buyer to come along and offer the right price. And it might take a long time for that to happen. The market is kind of thin.
For instance, a domain like best.com could be worth $1 million. Or who knows, it could be worth $25 million in the hands of that perfect buyer. Many investors are willing to speculate to bet that holding out for that big sale will pay off. In the meantime, domains like best.com just sit empty.
And to be fair to Rick, he sometimes sells or rents his domains to people that don't have a lot of money. He thinks of himself kind of like a venture capitalist. He wants startups and entrepreneurs to pitch on a great business plan for one of his domains. If they can't afford the domain today, Rick will lease it to them until they can.
Okay, so that maybe helps explain why there are so many big domains out there. But what specifically is going on with milk.com? After the break, we track down the owner of milk.com. We find out why he prefers making theory jokes to making a million dollars.
Okay, so we are we are talking to what I would consider an internet celebrity. I can't believe we're actually talking to the maybe a B list celebrity at best. Yeah, this is Dan Bornstein. He's a computer programmer in San Francisco, and he's basically milk.com, the website, come to life.
He is that person who created an FAQ where every answer was moo. And okay, here's the story of how Dan ended up owning milk.com. Back in 1994, he had a work email address, but he was thinking of changing jobs. So he wanted a personal email, which was kind of a futuristic idea at the time.
I had no personal email address. Personally, I was just like almost worth a thing. No Gmail. Yeah, no Gmail.
Right. But this is probably even pre-yathoo free high. We could only dream of Hotmail back in 1990. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So back then, if you wanted your own email, you had to get your own domain name. This was fairly early. So I could have gotten Dan.com or Daniel.com or what? Yeah, probably.
Like almost certainly, almost certainly. It was a green field. But Dan didn't want his email to be Dan at Dan.com. So instead he chose a domain name, kind of the same way that I chose my AIM screen name back in elementary school.
Yeah, this whole thing is based on a nickname that some guy at work had given him. He gave everybody a nickname. And he loved calling people by a nickname, whether they liked it or not. And he knew that I happened to like chocolate milk.
And so he started calling me Milk Boy. And I was like, yeah, he's like, hey, Milk Boy, how's it going? Milk Boy. I resented it a little bit.
But then I started to say, OK, I'm just going to own it. So that's it. That is how Dan decided on Milk.com. And at the time, all Dan had to do was apply for it.
Right. This was so early that domain names were free. Back then, the internet had different rules. There was an organization managing domain names, and Dan had to write a paragraph, explains them why he wanted Milk.com.
I basically gave a very short version of the fact that I gotten this nickname, Milk Boy. And I thought it would just be... OK, so you told the anonymous bureaucrat like this. You know that annoying guy in the office?
You gave me an academy. I didn't say that. Yes. OK.
And with that, Dan became the proud new owner of Milk.com. He used it to create his personal email address. He also made a website, put up some of his favorite recipes, his projects, his resume. Basically looks the same today as it did 30 years ago.
And over the years, Dan has gotten a lot of emails from people offering to buy Milk.com. So many offers that he eventually put up a page on his site that says Milk, not for sale. If you're not offering $10 million, I'm not interested. Which is kind of a contradiction.
So we asked Dan, is it for sale or not? 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? You know, that is what a lot of people have.
It's a reasonable question. There's a price, but I'm not trying to get it. I just want that my life. Dan doesn't seem to have some kind of secret plan for Milk.com.
He just likes being Milk Boy and enjoys having his website at Milk.com and having his email address at Milk.com. A few years ago, he got an offer for around $100,000. He said no, but he has opened offers. So what I'll say is that $100,000 offer, definitely low-ball.
$10 million offer, definitely take between the two? I don't know. Do you think you'd be more swayed if someone sent you a letter or email talking about all the reasons they would really love to own Milk.com? No, I would be more swayed by evidence of an escrow account with the right amount of money.
Oh, okay. Okay. After talking to Dan, I felt a bit torn. There's probably somebody out there who could be putting Milk.com to better use, like for the economy.
But if one day I visit Milk.com and it's full of got milk ads or it's the website of a tech startup, I will be sad. I love Dan's Milk.com. I find it delightful. It feels like this relic of the 90s when the internet was a quirky neighborhood.
There were art projects and niche blogs and personal websites like Dan's. And over time, the internet grew. And they were replaced by gleaming skyscrapers and corporate high rises. Otales.com, Facebook, Netflix.
But Dan's Milk.com is still there, like a historically preserved building from the internet's early days. That's right. You heard correctly. Planet Money is coming out with a book Alex Biosi you are writing it.
Yes, it is coming out next spring that we have been working so hard on it and are very, very excited to share it with all of you. You can sign up at the link in the show notes to hear about Presale Special Gifts and Book Tour Events. This episode was produced by Will Arubin and edited by Jess Chang. It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez and engineered by James Willets.
Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Dave Evanston and to the Hustle newsletter, write first reported on Milk.com. I'm Alex Biosi. And I'm Jeff Guo.
This is NPR. Thanks for listening.