Dot-com company

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A Dot-com company, or simply a 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"). During the stock market crash ending the Dot-com bubble, many failed and failing companies became known as dot-bombs, dot-cons, dot-composts or dot-gones.

While dot-com can refer to present day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with this business model during the late 1990s. Many of these startups 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. 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.

After the crash, many of the surviving firms dropped the .com from their names.^[1]

[edit] The three C's

Examples of companies divided over the Three C's.

There are a couple of ways to do business and make money with the internet. They are emphasized in the three C’s, which stand for Commerce, Content and Connection. Commerce is about selling products over the internet, like Amazon.com does. Content refers to placing content on the internet, varying from news headlines to blogs. Some examples are BBC News and Facebook. Lastly you can do business by supplying an internet connection, like AOL, one of the largest internet service providers (ISP) in the US.^[2]

Some companies, like Google, Microsoft and AOL, offer all three of them, which gives them an advantage on their competitors. This combination should be a success formula according to some information specialists.

[edit] List of well-known dot-bombs

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

• 360HipHop: Promoted as 'the ultimate hip-hop destination on the web' and funded by an array of big name investors like Russell Simmons, the lack of consistent content and an inability to earn more in advertising or eCommerce than they spent tanked the project. The site is now a link farm.
• AmCy.com: American Cybercast was the publisher of pioneering episodic sites TheSpot.com and EON4.com, with backing from Intel and Softbank. The company's collapse is documented in the book "Digital Babylon: How the Geeks, the Suits, and the Ponytails Fought to Bring Hollywood to the Internet."
• Broadband Sports: A network of sports-content Web sites that raised over $60 million before going bust in February 2001.
• CyberRebate: Promised customers a 100% rebate after purchasing products priced at nearly ten times the retail cost. Went bankrupt in 2002, leaving thousands of customers holding the bag. The bankruptcy was settled in 2005 and customers received about eight cents on the dollar from their original rebates.
• DigiScents: Tried to transmit smells over the internet.
• E-Loft.com: A paneuropean portal for university students, covering Italy, Germany, UK, Spain and France.
• Excite@Home: Excite, a pioneering Internet portal, merged with high-speed Internet service @Home in 1999 to become Excite@Home, promising to be the "AOL of Broadband" and partnering with cable operators to become the largest broadband ISP in the United States. After spending billions on acquisitions and trying unsuccessfully to sell the Excite portal during a sharp downturn in online advertising, the company filed for bankruptcy in September 2001 and shut down operations.
• Flooz.com: a service touted as "e-currency" launched at the height of the dot com boom in the late 90s and subsequently folded in 2001 due to lack of consumer acceptance and a bas