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Dotcom was a buisness landrush/landgrab Presumably whoever owned petstore.com would become the market leader in all pet products, because consumers were expect

Dotcom was a buisness landrush/landgrab Presumably whoever owned petstore.com would become the market leader in all pet products, because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there The advent of truly usable search engines, not just internet directories, popped this bubble and SEO became critical, until Google modified their adwords bidding market and changed the way buisness happens again Anyways, Moviephone.com would be the portal for all movie related stuff, a huge industry. Buying it for $100 million dollars is a lot, but owning 95% of the online movie industry would have been huge. In speculators eyes, it could have become the next Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime video... combined. You were buying the domain name, and all the speculative things you could do with it, as the one stop shop on the internet for that thing. The guy who owns the NBA team the Mavericks, he owned Broadcast.com which he sold for ~$1.1 Billion. It was supposed to be the radio/audio book version of moviephone.com

Polylactic_acid 7y ago
> because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there What a fascinating prediction. Its interesting that these days there is almost nothing useful on these "default" domain names and no user would ever type them in without knowing what was on it. Maybe the landgrab actually caused this since "petstore.com" was always owned by someone hoping to sell it later instead of using it for a legitimate website.
- crazypython 7y ago
  It came true for thesaurus.com– onelook.com/thesaurus is much better but few people have heard of it.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    They have better SEO. Whenever you search, thats the first one that comes up. Maybe the URL got it there, its hard to tell.
- pergadad 7y ago
  Im sure there is still use in those and massive benefits on owning a true one-word domain name. Think of the number of people that still pay mo they fees to AOL in the US. In a global context there are millions who don't really know how the internet works - from all the new arrivals (usvisa.com, health.in, ...) to many seniors (recipes.com, taxes.com) to in particular the 8-12 year olds arriving each year in the internet with little conceptual background (boobs.com, homework.com). But to be clear: moviefone/phone.com is obviously not one of those valuable domains, or at least will quickly sizzle out as the name is not really intuitive and you have to know about it to type it in (equivalent would be movies.com, cinema.com, etc).
kstrauser 7y ago
That was also the era of the “AOL keyword”, where print and TV ads would literally say something like “in AOL, type the keyword ‘petstore’ to visit us”. They were a namespace where catchy and/or obvious labels sold to the highest bidder. It seemed inevitable that the same marketing teams who’d pay AOL lots of money for “petstore” would think it’s a great idea to buy the same keyword in the (in their thinking) Internet equivalent dotcom namespace.

Polylactic_acid 7y ago

> because consumers were expected to just type in, literally, "petstore.com" and then shop there What a fascinating prediction. Its interesting that these days there is almost nothing useful on these "default" domain names and no user would ever type them in without knowing what was on it. Maybe the landgrab actually caused this since "petstore.com" was always owned by someone hoping to sell it later instead of using it for a legitimate website.

crazypython 7y ago
It came true for thesaurus.com– onelook.com/thesaurus is much better but few people have heard of it.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  They have better SEO. Whenever you search, thats the first one that comes up. Maybe the URL got it there, its hard to tell.
pergadad 7y ago
Im sure there is still use in those and massive benefits on owning a true one-word domain name. Think of the number of people that still pay mo they fees to AOL in the US. In a global context there are millions who don't really know how the internet works - from all the new arrivals (usvisa.com, health.in, ...) to many seniors (recipes.com, taxes.com) to in particular the 8-12 year olds arriving each year in the internet with little conceptual background (boobs.com, homework.com). But to be clear: moviefone/phone.com is obviously not one of those valuable domains, or at least will quickly sizzle out as the name is not really intuitive and you have to know about it to type it in (equivalent would be movies.com, cinema.com, etc).

kstrauser 7y ago

That was also the era of the “AOL keyword”, where print and TV ads would literally say something like “in AOL, type the keyword ‘petstore’ to visit us”. They were a namespace where catchy and/or obvious labels sold to the highest bidder. It seemed inevitable that the same marketing teams who’d pay AOL lots of money for “petstore” would think it’s a great idea to buy the same keyword in the (in their thinking) Internet equivalent dotcom namespace.