Dot-com company

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A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com or dot 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]

Contents

List of well-known failed dot-coms

In the late 1990s (as well as today) 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 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 them over to customers. 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 need to research price of 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.

Top 10 dot-com flops CNET.com

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[8] 2000
eGroups Yahoo! $432,000,000 June 28, 2000
AllBusiness.com NBCi $225,000,000[9] 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
Skype Microsoft $8,500,000,000 May 10, 2011
Ask.com IAC/InterActiveCorp $1,850,000,000 March 2005
TheHomeBuyingCenter.com Internet Leads Systems $20,000,000 2007
DialPad Communications Yahoo! June 14, 2005
MySpace News Corporation $580,000,000 July 2005
Konfabulator Yahoo! July 25, 2005
dodgeball Google May 2005
Provide Commerce Liberty Media $477,000,000 December 5, 2005[10]
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
Shopbop Amazon.com February 27, 2006[11]
SketchUp Google March 14, 2006
Writely Google March 9, 2006
AME Info Emap $27,000,000 July 4, 2006
BuyCostumes.com Liberty Media $55,000,000 July 26, 2006
YouTube Google $1,650,000,000 November 13, 2006
WebEx Cisco $3,200,000,000 March 15, 2007
Backcountry.com Liberty Media May 8, 2007
Last.fm CBS $280,000,000 May 30, 2007
Homestead Technologies Intuit $170,000,000 November 26, 2007
Bodybuilding.com Liberty Media $100,000,000 January 6, 2008
CNET Networks CBS $1,800,000,000 May 15, 2008

Notes and references

External links

External videos
Web StartUps, Net Cafe