Dot-com company

A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com, dot com or .com), is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain ".com" (in turn derived from the word "commercial").

While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with this business model that came into being during the late 1990s. Many such startups were formed to take advantage of the surplus of venture capital funding. Many were launched with very thin business plans, sometimes with nothing more than an idea and a catchy name. The stated goal was often to "get big fast", i.e. to capture a majority share of whatever market was being entered. The exit strategy usually included an IPO and a large payoff for the founders. Others were existing companies that re-styled themselves as Internet companies, many of them legally changing their names to incorporate a .com suffix.

With the stock market crash around the year 2000 that ended the dot-com bubble, many failed and failing dot-com companies were referred to punningly as dot-bombs,[1] dot-cons[2] or dot-gones.[3] Many of the surviving firms dropped the .com suffix from their names.[4]

List of well-known failed dot-coms

In the late 1990s many businesses were interested in investing in the Internet to expand their market. The Internet has the ability to reach out to consumers globally as well as providing more convenient shopping to the consumer. If planned and executed correctly, the Internet can greatly improve sales. However, there were many businesses in the early 2000s (decade) that did not plan correctly and that cost them their business.

One of the biggest mistakes early dot-com businesses made was that they were more interested in attracting visitors to their website but not necessarily winning customers over. Early e-commerce thought the most important factor was to have as many visitors as possible gather to their website and this would eventually translate into profits for their business. This was not necessarily the case and businesses failed. Early dot-com businesses also failed to take the time to properly research the situation before starting their businesses. There are many factors that come into play when starting a new business. Research needs to go into the product the business is actually trying to sell. The business also needs to research a price for their product. They need to be competitive with the cost of their product compared to their competitors. Early businesses failed to research how they promoted their product. If they decided to advertise their product only through the cheapest avenues (i.e. banner ads, radio), then most likely they would not get the amount of consumers they would if they advertised through more popular means.

There are thousands of failed companies from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Here are a few of the largest and most famous.

Main article: dot-com bubble

Acquisitions

Acquisition Bought by Price Date
Hotmail Microsoft $400,000,000 December 1997
Internet Movie Database Amazon.com 1998
Viaweb Yahoo! $49,000,000 June 8, 1998
Netscape Communications AOL $4,200,000,000 24 November 1998
GeoCities Yahoo! $3,570,000,000 January 28, 1999
Broadcast.com Yahoo! $5,700,000,000 April 1, 1999
Thawte VeriSign $575,000,000 December 1999
Network Solutions VeriSign $21,000,000[11] 2000
eGroups Yahoo! $432,000,000 June 28, 2000
AllBusiness.com NBCi $225,000,000[12] March 2000
HotJobs Yahoo! December 27, 2001
CDNow Amazon 2001
PayPal eBay $1,500,000,000 October 3, 2002
Inktomi Yahoo! $235,000,000 March 2003
Pyra Labs Google 2003
Overture Services, Inc. Yahoo! $1,700,000,000 July 2003
Keyhole Inc. Google 2004
Kelkoo Yahoo! March 25, 2004
Picasa Google July 2004
Oddpost.com Yahoo! July 9, 2004
Lycos Daum $95,400,000 August 2, 2004
Upcoming.org Yahoo! October 5, 2005
Ask.com IAC/InterActiveCorp $1,850,000,000 March 2005
DialPad Communications Yahoo! June 14, 2005
MySpace News Corporation $580,000,000 July 2005
Konfabulator Yahoo! July 25, 2005
dodgeball Google May 2005
Skype eBay & in turn Microsoft $2,500,000,000. September 12, 2005[13]
Provide Commerce Liberty Media $477,000,000 December 5, 2005[14]
Friends Reunited ITV plc $230,000,000 December 6, 2005
del.icio.us Yahoo! $15,000,000 December 9, 2005
Webjay Yahoo! January 9, 2006
IronPort Cisco Systems $830,000,000 June 25, 2007
Postini Google $625,000,000 2007
Photobucket MySpace $300,000,000 2007
ITA Software Google $700,000,000 2010
TweetDeck Twitter $40,000,000 2011[15]
DropCam Google $555,000,000 2014
SkyBox Imaging Google $500,000,000 2014

Notes and references

  1. USA Today. December 28, 2000 http://www.usatoday.com/money/dotcoms/dot039.htm. Retrieved May 1, 2010. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  2. Skillings, Jonathan. "Explaining the "dot-cons"". ZDNet.
  3. From dotcoms to dotgones.. - News - London Evening Standard. Thisislondon.co.uk (2001-12-13). Retrieved on 2013-07-19.
  4. Glasner, Joanne (2001-08-31). "Dot's In A Name No More". Wired news. Retrieved 2005-12-27.
  5. Malmsten, Ernst (2001). Boo Hoo: A dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe. Random House Business Books. ISBN 978-0712672399.
  6. Platt, Charles. "You've Got Smell!". Wired. Retrieved 28 November 2013. DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution.
  7. Helmore, Edward (2001-05-10). "So Who's Crying Over Spilt Milk?". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-06-27.
  8. "Game Mags Gone Because of MySpace Spam?". 2007-03-13. Retrieved 2007-06-27.
  9. Top 10 dot-com flops - CNET.com
  10. "The greatest defunct Web sites and dotcom disasters". CNET. 2008-06-05. Archived from the original on 2008-06-07. Retrieved 2011-02-10.
  11. Company History | Network Solutions
  12. NBCi agrees to acquire AllBusiness.com | CNET News.com
  13. http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=176402
  14. "Liberty Media Form 8-K". SEC.
  15. Moulds, Josephine (May 24, 2011). "Twitter buys TweetDeck for $40m". The Daily Telegraph (London).

See also

External links

External video
Web StartUps, Net Cafe
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