I thought that we all might enjoy a little distraction from our long work week. VisualEconomics.com publishes great graphics called infographs that display an incredible amount of information in a very entertaining picture format. You should definitely check out the website when you get the chance. But, for now, I thought that you would find the Top Ten dotcom crashes interesting (I sure did). These companies have wasted a lot of money on some dumb websites, and a few of them only lasted a couple of days.
Company |
Description |
Amount Spent |
Time In Business |
| Webvan | Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in warehouses, obviously delivering groceries is a losing proposition. |
$800 million |
1.5 Years |
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| Go.com | Even Mickey Mouse could not escape the dotcom bubble’s burst. Disney tried to launch its own web portal and search engine to no success. |
$790 million |
3 Years |
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| Amp’d Mobile | Provide youth with entertainment through their cell phones |
$360 million |
Less Than 2 Years |
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| Procket | Built routers and was ultimately bought by Cisco for $89 million |
$272 million |
5 Years |
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| Caspian Networks | Another boring computer router builder |
$300 million |
8 Years |
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| Kosmo.com | Movies, books, video games, and food delivered for free to your door in under 1 hour. Man! I wish this idea had worked! |
$250 million |
3 Years |
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| AllAdvantange | I was actually a customer/panel member of this company who would pay you to surf the web. In exchange to collect data about our surfing patterns, the company shared ad revenue with you. |
$200 million |
2 Years |
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| Cuecat.com | This company made a cat-shaped barcode reader that connected to your home computer where you could scan barcodes on products that would then launch websites related to the product. |
$185 million |
3 Years |
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| Pets.com | I love the puppet. And, that’s all I’ve got to say about that. I wish they had been able to keep their doors open just for the commercials. |
$150 million |
2 Years |
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| eToys.com | The company was originally sold to KB Toys, and now the website address belongs to Toys R Us. |
$100 million |
4 Years |
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A few more…. |
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| MVP.com | Online sports retailer |
$65 million |
1 Year |
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| Kibu.com | An early attempt at online networking |
$22 million |
Only 46 Days |
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| Digiscents | Wow! You just can’t make this crap up! This company went down in flames after then wasted $20 million on trying to get smells into video games and websites. I have no idea why this wouldn’t work?!?! |
$20 million |
2 Years |
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Search engines were simple better than cuecat and the focus was to narrow and to early. Now a few sites and companies use them ie. Librarything.com lets you scan the bar codes of your books to catalog them online and they use cuecats. I worked with an accounting firm that would bar code invoices and bills and scan them with cuecats.
Pets.com was about the only site I was sad to see go. I could order a bag of dog food for my parents dog for about 70% of the price in a store. I was killing them dog food orders.
Why are you including companies who were successfully acquired? It seems wrong to call these “bombs” when this is one of the desired outcomes of a VC investment.
I loved the Pets.com commercials too! That url has got to e worth a lot, it looks like PetSmart snatched it up.