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

still waiting

[gEvil (beta)]

I'm still waiting for someone to make me an offer on my domain: thissitewillmakemerich.com

Re:still waiting

[gEvil (beta)]

SOLD!



(hehehe. sucker.)

Re:still waiting

[fo0bar]

I own iwantyoutogivemeyourmoney.com. Unfortunately, it hasn't been as profitable as I expected.

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

[Ajehals]

The same people who thought that people would be exclusively buying their milk and meat (and admittedly other foodstuffs) on-line by now, some of them were VC's and dumped a huge amount of cash on this IIRC..

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

[techno-vampire]

Why? You're no different from most slashdotters.

Re:Marketing Genius

[Dancindan84]

Call me paranoid, but there's no way on earth any sane person would just plug in meat.com expecting (hoping?) to find steaks on an internet full of porn (which it was even back then). I'm just going to type in gloryhole.com and see if it's a site on glass blowing... AH GOD MY EYES!!

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

[JimDaGeek]

Oh, come on now. Non-tech people didn't have the same "dirty" thoughts as us geeks.

I have 85 year old grandparents that have been married for over 50 years! Yeah, longer than most of us geeks were just a dirty thought in their daddy's head (no pun intended).

Older people just don't put 2 and 2 together and come up with 4 when it comes to the inter-tubes. They are after all, a series of pipes.

Now, as far as old school goes, I remember watching a pic download over a dog-old modem of a nude chick. Damn, talk about fun. I remember seeing the boobs start to show and then slowly the belly and then... damn, ouch mom, what was that slap for?

Re:Marketing Genius

[OECD]

I don't think you guys are using your imagination. "milk.com" does not necessarily need to sell milk to be a marketing goldmine.

You're almost there...

• br3@st milk

Bingo! With that and "meat.com" and you can almost print money...

Re:Marketing Genius

[El Yanqui]

Well as a former employee of Kozmo.com when they first opened in Seattle, I can say with a bit of authority that VCs in the late 90s didn't realize a hell of a lot. "Deliver movies ordered online in an hour? With no delivery charge? Something, something. Profit!"

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...

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.

Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[morgan_greywolf]

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. You kids and yer newfangled 'domain names'! Sheesh! Why, in my day, we had !-paths. To e-mail someone far away was truly an exercise in typing:

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. You could tell the route your mail was gonna take! And we LIKED it that way!

Now you kids get off my lawn!

Domain names, indeed. *shakes head in disgust*

Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[smellsofbikes]

I was at a small, but unaccountably well-connected college, sending email to my dad, who was working at a big tech company. Usually I just copied whatever route he'd chosen, and then marvelled as my mail got to him in LESS THAN TWO HOURS -- the very idea! At the time, it was still pretty unusual that two people would both have access to email, so I actually showed off to my friends -- "hey look at THIS!"
Well, one of my friends knew more than me, so he taught me about uuhosts -- a way to find out what was connected, for the times when my email was just vanishing because something, somewhere, was offline. So I used it. The next day I got some Very Crabby Email from a sysop who tore me a new one for using a satellite uplink to send personal email to Japan and back.

It felt like having a switchboard operator yell at me. I was *mortified* and I didn't even know for sure what I'd done.

Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[gbaldwin2]

I did something similar. I worked for a company that was doing software for the Boeing 777 and we polled them like every 10 minutes. We also polled sun and hp, 2 fairly well connect west coast servers. One day I came into work and our uucp links were melting down with email traffic (probably 50 emails an hour or something lame like that). The new UUCP maps had come out and we were the shortest hop to Boeing from just about anywhere. I ended up changing the maps to make us look more distant and implementing some email filtering. Good times...

Over all these years

[Hsien-Ko]

purple.com always delivered what it promises.

Am I in that group?

[skinny.net]

I had a couple offers to buy my domain by 2 different owners and eras of skinny.com. I decided that an easy to remember URL and email address was worth more than they offered. The big bid was $5k, but half in cash, half in services I didn't need.

I wasn't holding out for the $big, but would take it of course. It was a personal investment, not a financial one.

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)

Re:A great name does not a great site make

[forty7]

He's not talking like Yoda, he's talking like Richard Lovelace. To quote: "Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage."

Someone please tell me that this is still a well-known quote, even if the source isn't. Please :o)

The Future

[carrier lost]

"Hello, internet? I'd like some meat, please."

"Just send it right over. Thanks, bye"

Opera

[NewsWatcher]

I have sometimes wondered what Opera aficionados make of opera.com

I am sure someone at Slashdot will know how Opera got its name. I kind of guessed that some geek way back bought the domain name thinking it would be worth millions, then in the end used it for a company cause it was cool to have a generic domain.

Some domain names have been useful though. In Australia people sell ".au.com" domains, which are obviously sub-domains, quite different to Australia's official ".com.au" domains.

Re:Opera

[Mr. Underbridge]

Opera is the singular of opus, "work". Easy enough to figure out why the browser uses that name.

Is that meant to be ironic? Web browsers are what people use to *not* work.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the browser that doesn't work is called "Internet Explorer".

Oh wait, I see what you mean now.

apple.com

[Tuoqui]

Whoever got apple.com must have been sitting on a goldmine.

Obligatory Anchorman Reference

[kellyb9]

"Milk was a BAD choice"

Re:Forgot one

[antifoidulus]

The hosting costs crucified him

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.

Codeplex.com

[Brobock]

I was the original owner of "Codeplex.com" (Not so obvious of a name) before I sold it to Microsoft for a eye whopping $600. The site is now Microsoft's official opensource repository.

Microsoft created an umbrella company who specifically designed a horrendous website with no links back to them. Even after the research (which I found nothing), I thought I would be a nice guy and sell it to this nobody.

I know they did that so they didn't have to payout larger sums of money, but I still feel as if I was screwed first hand by Microsoft.

Domain Gold Rush 2.0

[WebmasterNeal]

I suspect that in the next 10-20 years there will be a big rush on people's full names. Currently only web developers and bloggers have their own name as a domain but as the web becomes more and more popular and a part of people's life, they will eventually buy their own name and point it somewhere.

That's why I own http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/ and grosskopf.name. Having your last name as a domain is nice because it allows you to create sub-domains of family members and create email addresses such as neal@grosskopf.name.