dot-com

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Dot-Com

A business, especially a publicly-traded company, that conducts most or all of its business over the Internet. Dot-coms may conduct business in one or more of the following areas: Content, Commerce, and Connection. Content companies provide information, either for free or for a charge, and earn most of their operating income from advertising. Commerce companies sell new and/or used goods directly over the Internet. Connection companies provide Internet services directly to customers.

Dot-coms were hugely popular investments in the 1990s, with IPOs of hundreds of dollars per share, even if a company had never produced a profit and, in some cases, had never earned any revenue. This came from the theory that Internet companies needed to expand their customer bases as much as possible and thus corner the largest possible market share, even if this meant massive losses. While this worked for some dot-coms, notably Google, which did not produce a profit for its first several years of operation, the theory was unsustainable because, in a given industry, only one or two companies could corner large market shares, meaning most dot-coms were doomed to failure. This dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

dot-com

1. Of or relating to a company or the stock of a company engaged primarily in a business associated with the Internet. Amazon.com is the most obvious example of a dot-com company.

2. See Internet stock.

References in periodicals archive ?

Putting aside the considerable debate within finance as to the nature of demand and supply curves for financial assets, a plausible explanation for the magnitude and timing of the dot-com bubble is the shift of stock issuance to equities with a large delayed supply response (IPOs) from equities where the bulk of supply is felt immediately.

Supply: a tale of two bubbles

When the dot-com bubble burst, the profession got a lot of bad press.

IT IS IT WHEN IT COMES TO HOT JOBS

A lot of companies got caught in the dot-com bubble," said Chizen in a 2004 interview.

The Adobe warship begins to turn

Perhaps conscious of this, Zook makes it clear that the dot-com bubble did in fact rely partly on assumptions about what technology can do: 'it was the outcome of a new technology that for a time seemed to be in the process of restructuring the entire economy, providing small companies with a golden opportunity for growth' (123).

The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital, Dot-coms, and Local Knowledge

Steve Albrecht, CPA, associate dean of accounting at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, attributes the uptick in college enrollments not only to the demands created by Sarbanes-Oxley but also to reduced competition for finance students following the burst of the dot-com bubble five years ago.

Accounting education changes course: communication skills and real-world cases broaden the syllabus

Bach says the drop is the largest single-quarter decline since the tail-end of the dot-com bubble 5 years ago.

Office vacancies hit new low

Eerily echoing the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many processors and brokers note that while London Metal Exchange prices have been showing sharp declines, the market for nonferrous metals is still somewhat stable overall.

Aluminum markets slowing down

Strapped companies looked far more skeptically at CRM software after the dot-com bubble burst.

Oh, what a tangled web ...: web content can be unruly. Here's how campus webmasters are using content management systems to gain control

The dot-com bubble burst, but in the five years since Wal-Mart has doubled its sales and more than doubled its earnings.

Top financial job calls for savoir faire

In the early 2000s, the burst of the dot-com bubble also meant dissolution for many of the online broker pioneers.

The surviving few: only a handful of the online insurance-broker pioneers remain in a market that many left when the dot-com boom faded

Oracle notched up record sales of new software licences in Europe in its fiscal fourth quarter, even outperforming revenues during the dot-com bubble of 1999 and 2000, according to its European chief, Sergio Giacoletto.

E-business: Oracle coining in software fees

With the burst of the dot-com bubble and shaky confidence in mutual funds last year, the investment climate for mining exploration has never been better.