The Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names

cheezitmike writes "ITworld.com uses the Wayback Machine to document the histories of five generic domain names: music.com, eat.com, car.com, meat.com, and milk.com. 'In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It's easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late '90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early '90s.'"

Comments

Marketing Genius

[deadeye766]

I'm no marketing genius, but who the hell thought domain names like meat.com and milk.com were going to be goldmines?!?

Re:Marketing Genius

[phoebusQ]

Before web searching was as effective as it is now (largely thanks to Google), it wasn't illogical to think that people might type generic domains to find what they are looking for, i.e. meat.com if they are looking to order meat, get info on meat, or what have you.

The idea that many marketers (and others) had is that not only would owning such domains get you more traffic, but it would also begin to associate the very idea of _noun_ on the web with your particular brand of _noun_.

Re:Marketing Genius

[KillerCow]

I'm no marketing genius, but who the hell thought domain names like meat.com and milk.com were going to be goldmines?!?

Someone who thought that they could sell meat.com to:
The American Butchers' Association
The German Butchers' Association
Elite Butchers Association
The National Meat Packers Association
Alberta meat packers
Butcher Consultants Ltd
M&M Meat Shops
PETA
A Gay Porn Site

Someone who thought that they could sell milk.com to:
The USDA
Dairy Farmers of Ontario (owner of milk.org)
British Columbia Milk Marketing Board (milk-bc.com)
Any other milk marketing board (big, subsidized, cash-rich, protected business)
A Gay Porn Site

I'm no marketing genius either, but I think that it would be safe to think that those names would be worth at least $1000 to any of those organizations. Turning $10 into $1000 is a pretty good scam if you can do it a couple of times.

Re:Marketing Genius

[jawtheshark]

Ehm, you're confusing "slashdotters with experience" and "normal people". Normal people would most certainly write things like "dinner.com" or "restaurant.com", just to stay a bit more realist. The GP is right, Google changed the market. Domain names aren't as important as they used to be, search ranks are.

Re:Marketing Genius

[Firehed]

How could a VC firm not be intelligent enough to realize that mail-order perishables isn't going to work out well, especially on cheap heavy things that would be a logistical nightmare to ship?

I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk. I suppose an online milkman type thing would stand a chance but people are so used to running out for milk every day anyways that it just wouldn't make sense. Margins on most foods are just too low for anything of that nature to make sense. I suppose filet mignon could work (and, indeed, I'm pretty sure you can buy it from Amazon these days) since it's got a much more workable price/weight ratio, but this is like pets.com thinking that shipping fifty-pound bags of kitty litter would work out.

Re:Marketing Genius

[DerekLyons]

How could a VC firm not be intelligent enough to realize that mail-order perishables isn't going to work out well, especially on cheap heavy things that would be a logistical nightmare to ship?

Given the extensive history of companies selling perishables mail order, I'd suspect the lack of intelligence is on the part of the Slashdot poster rather than the VC firms. Omaha Steaks has been doing it since at least the 70's (I say at least because I think I have an even earlier advertisement from them somewhere in my files, but cannot locate it ATM). Swiss Colony even longer. In fact, such shipping has been going on since dry ice was first produced in industrial quantites in the 1920's.
 
Look in the advertisements of most National Geographics of the 50's, or and food magazine from the same era, and you'll see ads aplenty.
 
</culinary_geek>
 
The mistake the VC firms of the dot bomb era made was, as you point out, marketing the wrong things to the wrong demographic. However, given the history of food deliveries and the increased performance of shipping companies as the 90's advanced - and it wasn't clearly obvious that their schemes were off the mark. (Doubly so since the big grocery chains have been slowly expanding into online ordering...)
 
Foresight isn't always 20-20 on Slashdot either, back in the day there were a lot of posts explaining how Amazon and Netflix were going to fail 'any day now'. They simply couldn't compete with bricks-and-mortar everyone said. The future lay with clicks-and-mortar, with Barnes and Noble, and Blockbuster...

Forgot one

[billius]

porn.com

Re:Forgot one

[gbaldwin2]

sex.com was the fun one. With all the who-stole-what intrigue.

The operative word is "almost"

[winkydink]

...it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there...

The only reason companies resort to those names is because (a) all the good ones are taken and/or (b) there are potential trademark infringement issues with using more common sounding names.

Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that domain names pre-date the world wide web. Someone may have been using barf.com as a simple FTP site and never had a web page associated with it.

A great name does not a great site make

[Nemilar]

The biggest advantage to a generic domain name is that you'll get lots of type-ins; for example, freemusic.com* I'm sure gets hundreds of hits a day, just from (unknowing) users typing it in, hoping for something good.

But in the new era, sites become popular because they are viral; flickr didn't become popular because of type-ins, it became popular because it offered a good service that people found useful, and it spread.

--A great name does not a great site make; but a great site can a great name make.-- Heck, just at Google! Verb, noun, and fun to say!

(*Disclaimer: I have no idea what's at freemusic.com, but I'm guessing it's parked by someone)

Badge of honor?

[spectecjr]

Badge of honor to have an opaque domain name?

Not so.

Try registering a domain name that isn't opaque. It's nearly impossible these days - people bought all the obvious ones, and most of the non-obvious ones. Most of them are just domain squatters hoping to get rich, or spamvertising sites.

Re:Codeplex.com

[lzcd]

So you feel cheated because you didn't get a chance to cheat someone else?