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

[fo0bar]

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

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

[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...

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_.

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: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: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: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:Forgot one

[antifoidulus]

The hosting costs crucified him

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.