Notable Dot-com Companies

A dot-com company is a company that does most of its business on the internet, usually through a website that uses the top-level domain “.com”. The URL suffix .com stands for commercial. Since dot-com companies are web-based, most of their products and services are delivered through internet-based mechanisms, even when physical products are involved, and some dot-com companies do not offer any physical products at all.

The dot-com bubble was a period of excessive speculation and a period of extreme growth in the use and adoption of the internet that occurred roughly from 1994 to 2000. The burst of the bubble was known as the dot-com crash, and many of these internet companies failed and shut down. Below are some notable dot-com companies.

Broadcast.com: a streaming media website led by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban that was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in stock that is now defunct

Yahoo!: a web services provider that provided a Web portal, search engine, and other related services

Napster: one of the earliest, most widely used, music file-sharing websites that was subject to lawsuits over copyright infringement and ultimately got shut down before being acquired

Ask Jeeves: a question answering website and search engine that was founded in 1996 whose stock dropped from $190 per share in 1999 to $0.86 per share in 2002 that is now Ask.com

Pets.com: a website that sold pet supplies online with over $300 million in funding that filed for bankruptcy in 2000

Amazon.com: a multinational tech company that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence

Startups.com: a company that helped entrepreneurs start a business that shut down in 2002

Boo.com: an online apparel retailer that launched in 1999 and filed for bankruptcy in May 2000 after spending $188 million in just six months

Excite: an internet portal launched in 1995 by Stanford students that provided a variety of content that merged with @Home Network and filed for Chapter 11 in October 2001 before being acquired by Ask.com in March 2004

GeoCities: a web hosting service that went public in 1998 and acquired by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in January 1999 and shut down in 2009

Infoseek: a website designed to be an online yellow pages funded by ads with some simple chat rooms that raised $75 million in a December 1998 IPO that ran into trouble with the SEC and acquired by Disney in 1999 and ultimately shut down

Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dotcom.asp
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/dot-com-bubble-companies/