Computer.com

Last updated

Computer.com was a short-lived dot-com company founded in 1999. After spending half of its $7 million in venture capital on ads during Super Bowl XXXIV, it was sold to Office Depot in 2000. [1] It is significant as a case study for business historians and others interested in the dot-com bubble.

Contents

History

Prior to 1999, the domain computer.com was owned by Gary Kremen, who sold it for $500,000. [2] [3] In 1999, Mike Ford and Mike "Zappy" Zapolin founded Computer.com as a general-purpose website to teach people about various aspects of computing. [1] After raising $7 million in venture capital, [note 1] Computer.com partnered with an advertising agency to create three Super Bowl advertisements six weeks before the game started. [1] Initially, they were dismayed, as due to their late entry, their time slot was located at the end of the game, at the two-minute warning. However, thanks to the closely contested game, the advertisement became one of the highest-rated of all time. [1]

After Super Bowl XXXIV, the company secured "an additional $2 million in a second round of funding." [4] In late 2000, the company was sold to Office Depot.

Operation

It is unclear whether Computer.com ever turned a profit or delivered any kind of actual service to consumers. Viewers visiting the site in response to the Super Bowl commercial would have found only a small dictionary of terms such as "MP3" and links to buy basic home computer products from other companies, mostly outpost.com. [5] Computer.com became a notorious example of the extreme of the "dot-com bubble," in that it appeared to have gone through its entire lifecycle, including the $7 million Super Bowl ad, without ever articulating what it offered as a company or making a sale of any kind. [6]

Domain usage

As of 2024 the domain is currently being used as a front end for a supposedly modified version of ChatGPT similar to Bing Chat.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ CNet.com gives the company's initial capital as $5.8 million.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dot-com bubble</span> Tech stock speculative craze, c. 1997–2003

The dot-com bubble was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lycos</span> Search engine and web portal

Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is a subsidiary of Ybrant Digital.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Super Bowl XXXIV</span> 2000 National Football League championship game

Super Bowl XXXIV was an American football game played at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 30, 2000, to determine the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 1999 season. The National Football Conference (NFC) champion St. Louis Rams defeated the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Tennessee Titans 23–16 to claim their first Super Bowl win and first NFL championship since 1951. It is the most recent NFL championship in which both teams were seeking their first Super Bowl title.

LookSmart is an American search advertising, content management, online media, and technology company. It provides search, machine learning and chatbot technologies as well as pay-per-click and contextual advertising services.

Pets.com was a dot-com enterprise headquartered in San Francisco, U.S, that sold pet supplies to retail customers. The website was launched in November 1998 and was shut down in November 2000. A high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including an appearance in the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. Its popular sock puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People magazine and appeared on Good Morning America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webvan</span> Bankrupt technology company

Webvan was a dot-com company and grocery business that filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after 3 years of operation. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US areas: the San Francisco Bay Area; Dallas; Sacramento; San Diego; Los Angeles; Orange County, California; Chicago; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and Atlanta, Georgia. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities by 2001.

Gary Kremen is an American engineer, entrepreneur and politician who founded the personals site Match.com, was the first registrant of Sex.com and founder of Clean Power Finance, and is a board member of the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Since 1993, Kremen has been a private and angel investor in over 100 companies, of which several have gone public or had liquidity events.

GoDaddy Inc. is an American publicly traded Internet domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, and incorporated in Delaware. As of 2023, GoDaddy is the world's fifth largest web host by market share, with over 62 million registered domains. The company has around 21 million customers and over 6,900 employees worldwide.

Direct response television (DRTV) is any television advertising that asks consumers to respond directly to the company — usually either by calling a toll-free telephone number, sending an SMS message, or by visiting a web site. This is a form of direct response marketing.

Kibu.com was an American website for teenage girls that was created in 1999 and launched in 2000. The website was founded as an online community for girls to discuss and exchange advice.

AllAdvantage was an Internet advertising company that positioned itself as the world’s first "infomediary" by paying its users/members a portion of the advertising revenue generated by their online viewing habits. It became most well known for its slogan "Get Paid to Surf the Web," a phrase that has since become synonymous with a wide array of online ad revenue sharing systems.

A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com, is a company that conducts most of its businesses on the Internet, usually through a website on the World Wide Web that uses the popular top-level domain ".com". As of 2021, .com is by far the most used TLD, with almost half of all registrations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Super Bowl commercials</span> Television commercials during the Super Bowl

Super Bowl commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads, are high-profile television commercials featured in the U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself, as many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials. Many Super Bowl advertisements have become well known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. Some commercials airing during, or proposed to air during the game, have also attracted controversy due to the nature of their content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vignette Corporation</span>

Vignette Corporation was a company that offered a suite of content management, web portal, collaboration, document management, and records management software. Targeted at the enterprise market, Vignette offered products under the name StoryServer that allowed non-technical users to create, edit and track content through workflows and publish it on the web. It provided integration for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and legacy systems, supporting Java EE and Microsoft.NET. Vignette's integrated development environment and application programming interface offered an alternative to conventional Common Gateway Interface/vi/Perl web development. StoryServer was used on many large websites including those of CNET, UnitedHealth Group, The Walt Disney Company, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox News, National Geographic Channel, Pharmacia & Upjohn, MetLife, BSkyB, the 2004 Summer Olympics, and NASA.

Cyberian Outpost was an online vendor of discount computer hardware and software that operated the website outpost.com. After its IPO in 1998, it reached a peak market capitalization of $1 billion, but, after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, its stock price fell rapidly and the company was acquired by Fry's Electronics in 2001 for $21 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CNET</span> American media website about technology and consumer electronics

CNET is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. CNET originally produced content for radio and television in addition to its website before applying new media distribution methods through its internet television network, CNET Video, and its podcast and blog networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Actua Corporation</span> Defunct venture capital firm

Actua Corporation was a venture capital firm. During the dot com bubble, the company had a market capitalization of over $50 billion. The company was originally known as Internet Capital Group, Inc. and changed its name to Actua Corporation in September 2014. In 2018, the company underwent liquidation.

The Force is a television advertisement created by to promote Volkswagen's Passat.

Super Bowl XXXIV featured 14 advertisements from 14 different dot-com companies, each of which paid an average of $2.2 million per spot. In addition, five companies that were founded before the dot-com bubble also ran tech-related ads, and 2 before game ads, for a total of 21 different dot-com ads. These ads amounted to nearly 20 percent of the 61 spots available, and $44 million in advertising. In addition to ads which ran during the game, several companies also purchased pre-game ads, most of which are lesser known. All of the publicly held companies which advertised saw their stocks slump after the game as the dot-com bubble began to rapidly deflate.

Epidemic Marketing was a short-lived dot-com company headquartered in Denver, Colorado that operated in the viral marketing sector. Before it closed its doors in June 2000, it employed approximately 60 people. Its website was located at www.epidemic.com.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Shroeder, Charlie. "The Dot-Com Super Bowl" Archived 2016-02-03 at the Wayback Machine , Weekend America , 2 February 2008. Accessed February 26 2014.
  2. ↑ "Computer.com Homepage". Archived from the original on 6 October 1999. Retrieved 2017-01-17.
  3. ↑ "Gary Kremen | The Brutal Battle for Sex.com". Sexdotcom.com. 1963-09-20. Retrieved 2017-01-17.
  4. ↑ Sandoval, Greg. "Start-up with pricey Super Bowl ad goes bust", Cnet.com\\, 14 June 2000. Accessed February 28 2014.
  5. ↑ "Computer.com homepage". Computer.com homepage. Archived from the original on 15 August 2000. Retrieved 1 October 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  6. ↑ "Revisiting the Ads From 2000's 'Dot-Com Super Bowl'". Revisiting the Ads From 2000’s ‘Dot-Com Super Bowl’. Retrieved 1 October 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.