The Dot Com Super Bowl

An anonymous reader writes "Remember Epidemic.com and Lifeminders.com? Me neither. But Forbes has a funny story looking back on these dot-bombs and a bunch of other internet startups which advertised during the 2000 Super Bowl. They call the game The Bubble Bowl since over a dozen internet companies blew $40 million on ads, and then most of them went out of business. It's cool to see the ads (I miss the pets.com sock puppet!) and remember some of these crackheaded business ideas."

Comments

Forbes web site is one big commercial

[xmas2003]

Maybe it's just me, but I felt like when I went to the Forbes site I felt like it was one big commercial. The first link has about a dozen ads, and the second link is doing constant updates - seemed to be worse in IE than Firefox.

Re:Forbes web site is one big commercial

[tylernt]

I think the web developers at Forbes should win an award for the dumbest web interface ever. Every time I got halfway through reading the text, the site would send me to the next 'slide' and I had to hit 'Previous' and then 'Stop' so I had time to finish.

What kind of brain-dead MORON designs that kind of web interface? Do they really think users are incapable of clicking 'Next' by themselves? How did they think the users GOT to forbes.com!?

Geeks in business

[MyLongNickName]

But everyone knows that geeks know everything about business, and the PHBs are the ones who destroy business! How could all these big geek corps go out of business? I blame Bill Gates and George Bush.

Re:Geeks in business

[jellomizer]

Point taken, that nature of the echonomy back in 2000 was much different. Geeks were considered the way to the future, of profit. But part of the problem is that we got greedy and started asking for more money then we were honestly worth. A normal cubial programmer developing a web site should not be getting $100k a year. So when the .COMs started to slide they give them an option less pay to quit. (Because the job market is still large at the time most decided to get laid off because they can find an other job at that same wage, there are still some who still think they can!) Entry Level Programmers Went from 50k a year in 2001 to about 25-35k a year. Heck I am almost back to my starting salary.

Re:Geeks in business

[jellomizer]

Well I don't think it was about marketing the code monkey did a good job at that, if they didn't do the job at marketing then the Dot Bomb would never have started. People did by stuff online or at least looked at it the problem was that they realized there was no real value to some of this stuff online vs. going to a store. Paying Shipping on a 40 lbs bag of dogfood makes the savings a lot less. Then there is the lost value of having to wait for it to ship. It was more of an issue that there money was coming in from investors making the company grow very fast faster then they should so they expanded themselfs faster then actuall profit so when the invesors stopped they had all these extra expenses without the revenue.

Re:Geeks in business

[bartle]

All they know is that there must be growth, growth, growth. So here they found something where they believed it would promise growth and wealthiness beyond imagination -- and for a short period of time they were right. Because they pumped money in like mad.

I worked for Epidemic.com in a technical capacity during it's brief bolide existance and though I didn't sit in on all the high level meetings I walked out of there with a sense that the whole company had been conned. It was obvious to everyone in the company that we were blowing stupid amounts of money but I really think this was due less to management incompetence than pressure from the investors to spend everything we got.

The plan was, I believe, to create a pile of small companies, drive them to IPO, and make a ton on the stock. The investors knew exactly what they were doing and it was never their intention to create long term businesses. And it worked - the controlling forces made tons of cash, the general public got screwed out of money, and some corporate officers got handcuffed to a sinking ship.

let's not single out the people with ideas...

[jxyama]

>remember some of these crackheaded business ideas

let's not single out the people with "crackheaded" ideas for scrutny and remember the VCs that believed those ideas were worth their money.

Fuck you, Forbes

[karmaflux]

I read the article. Some of it was amusing.

But the idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be shot. Or fired. Or both.

Futurama referenced

[InfiniteWisdom]

The idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.

Re:Futurama referenced

[Tablizer]

The idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.

Amen! It kept moving to the next image before I even asked it to. And, when I closed the pop-up mpeg/movie snippet viewer, it closed the original window also.

Tip to designer: If HTML can do the same thing, then do not use JavaScript instead. And, lose the image progression timer.

Forgotten?

[Otter]

Today, most of these Internet pioneers are dead and gone, forgotten as the score of the game (St. Louis 23, Tennessee 16).

The tackle on the one yard line, with time expired, to prevent a game-tying touchdown? Yeah, there's probably not a football fan alive who remembers that ending. I guess my brain is too full of memories of the Cowboys beating the Bills 48-14 six years in a row.

Re:slightly off topic

[AtariAmarok]

"A bunch of radio stations in LA are running Super Bowl contests, but they can't use the term "Super Bowl". They have to call it The Big Game or something to that effect"

I'm pretty sure that the case is, any time someone has some promotion tied to the Superbowl, they have to pay for it.

It seems to go beyond that, however. I recall a "Green Lantern" comic years ago in which the plot involved the Super Bowl. It was called "The Bowl" through the entire thing. I guess they want to be paid for stories about the Superbowl too.

Stupid me

[Tablizer]

During the dot-com heyday, many of us secretly agreed that it would probably mostly crash and burn one day. Even a co-inventor of the Internet was predicting a crash. I once lightly entertained the idea of making screenshots of some of the more extreme sites with their wacky melted-plastic punk look as kind of a dot-com scrap book.

If I had bothered to go through with the idea, then I could have created a "Dot-com memory lane" website that would have pretty good traffic in which I could sell ad space.

I can just slap myself for not going through with it.

Re:Stupid me

[t_allardyce]

I remember predicting it wouldn't last too, it was just a gold rush for the few viable business ideas, the trouble was all the stupid PHB investors had no idea what it was all about and just pumped millions into it assuming it was the next biggest thing. 'gotta invest in a dot com' - Im no economics expert, but I don't see why most of these companies needed more than about $20,000 to get off to a decent start, also why anyone would need a separate net shop for separate things - amazon for example does well because they sell everything to anyone, anywhere, theres not really room in the world for more than a few giants like that.. anyone who wasted millions and lost deserved their stupidity.

Re:the bubble bowl?

[Leo McGarry]

am i mistaken to think that "NSFW" is not a commonly used acronym here..?

Yes. You are also mistaken to think that sentences aren't supposed to begin with capital letters, that the personal pronoun "I" can be used without capitalization, that two periods followed by a question mark is a punctuation mark and that it's okay to end a sentence with an ellipsis without a period.

Furthermore, please avoid the use of acronyms that aren't already accepted as words themselves. You can say things like "DVD" and "CPU" because they're universally understood, but generally acronyms serve only to hinder communication, not to facilitate it. This isn't 1850. You're not Western Union by the letter.

At this very moment, this Web site is running a story called "Don't Write FORTRAN" that cleverly (or, you know, not) admonishes computer programmers for writing illiterate computer code. Might I humbly suggest that we hold ourselves to the same standard when it comes to things meant to be read by other human beings?

Re:I worked for one of them....

[Reignking]

Didn't marketing think that

1) People would continue watching the Super Bowl
2) Even if people were captivated by the ad, visit the website, and not call??

Re:About the Dot Bombs...

[nine-times]

Well, at least as far as I can tell, most of the stuff that has bailed out was stupid, superfluous, overly flashy, or otherwise destined for failure anyways.

Sounds pretty much right to me. Seems like a lot of the ventures that failed consisted of people who didn't understand the potential of the internet selling business proposals to other people who didn't understand the internet at all. They were crappy business proposals that would have been thrown out immediately, but because it had the work "internet" somewhere in there, and "internet" was the magic ingredient that always made money, everyone blindly went along.

So you end up mostly with companies who follow one of three models:

1. Companies like Dell and Barns & Noble, who already had successful businesses, adding an additional distribution channel
2. Companies like Amazon.com and ebay, who, for the most part, function as an extremely comprehensive mail-order catalogue with good search capabilities
3. Sites like Slashdot and Fark, or media sites like Cnet or CNN. Basically, sites that offer news, reviews, and cheap content and support themselves through advertising, usually banner ads of some kind.

Maybe there are exceptions. I guess you could add another category for "search engines", but the failure ratio of those are high. Yahoo and Google made it through, but that's about it. Plus, both of those sites border on the 3rd category, so I'm not sure where to put them.

iTMS-- does it count as a dot-com? It's not really a web site, and it might be category 1, since it's a new distribution channel for an existing business. But also it doesn't make money for itself, so it's a funny example.

But yeah, a whole lot of these businesses were ill-conceived silliness banking on those magic internets to generate money out of nowhere.

Re:sock puppet lives on

[PCM2]

Note none of the "noun" Dot Coms survived... Warehouse.com or Drugstore.com or Shoes.com.

Whaa--? Drugstore.com is still around. The Warehouse.com domain is owned by CDW, which bought MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse, etc. I don't know if Shoes.com is the original, but it looks like an online shoestore to me. If the name recognition on "noun" dot-coms is so poor, you'd think they would have all just packed it in by now.

What a Horrid Site

[Bob Uhl]

Dear God in Heaven, that has to be the worst article (not the summary, which I enjoyed) I have ever read. I read the intro blurb, and then look aroudn for a button reading 'more' or 'next' or 'this way to the egress.' Only after mistakenly following another link do I discover that it's the ad-banner-shaped JPEG. Yeah, guys: hide a navigation device the one place any web reader ignores by default.

Then the slideshow starts, and I glance away at my other box to do some more work--only to discover that it's done. It automatically changes slides, unlike every other gallery and in fact site on the Internet, which lets one choose when to change pages. Peeved, I click 'previous' a dozen times (they don't give one a 'first' button), then quickly hit 'stop' (yeah, thanks for making me work at this, forbes.com). I read the first slide, chuckle and hit 'next.' The next slide appears, and as I'm reading it, it changes: they don't remember that one wants the show to be stopped!

What sort of microcephalic twit would think this is a good browsing experience?

Forbes' short memory

[amightywind]

I find it interesting that Forbes casts the dotcom bubble in such a negative light when at the time they were the formost cheerleader of the worst episode corporate corruption in 60 years. No hypocracy there.

Re:the bubble bowl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: the link in above post is NOT safe for those at work.

Did you think there would be much confusion about a link called "the breast bowl" that links to janetjacksonbreast.com?

Re:Advertising perspective

[TheWizardOfCheese]

[...] Branding of that scale is usually only best for companies that have an established foot print in the market place, and that have a customerbase who is already aware of their products.

Once you think about that for a bit, it is pretty obvious how foolish it was of the dotcoms to advertise during the Superbowl. [...]

You have seen the trees but not the forest. During the bubble, Nortel ran endless branding ads. Why? Individual consumers did not buy their products. No, but they did buy their stock.

Once you consider that the true product of snakeoil.com is not snake oil, but SnakeOil stock, the picture snaps into focus. Advertising during the superbowl may have been unethical, it may have been bad timing, and it may have been unlucky, but it was not necessarily foolish.