Top Seven Dot Com Busts

7. Pets.com

I think everyone remembers the stupid talking sock puppet that Pets.com foisted on the world in a million dollar Super Bowl ad (and as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade), but the puppet wasn’t enough to save the company from shipping costs on 40 pound bags of dog food. Pets.com blew through $85 million in just nine months, which is pretty damn impressive.

6. eToys.com

In 1999 it seemed like every site had the letter e in front of it, which I never really understood. It actually seems like a strategy for someone who doesn’t have the money to purchase the proper domain name for their company (which in this case would have been toys.com), but that wasn’t a problem for eToys. They raised $166 million in a May, 1999 IPO which you’d think would have been plenty of money to buy a real domain. That means the geniuses behind this site actually preferred the e, which probably helps to explain why their stock was trading at nine cents a share just two years after that IPO.

5. Go.com

It’s tough to understand how a website backed by Disney could fail so badly, especially when it included ESPN, but Disney was never able to make up the millions it spent on promotion. Weird restrictions on content (had to be family friendly to please the Mouse I guess) didn’t help, and Disney ended up writing off almost $800 million in losses.

4. Flooz.com

One of the stupidest names of the dot bom era, flooz wanted to become the currency of the internet. It’s really hard to figure out why anyone would want to use virtual currency as opposed to just whipping out the credit card, but flooz.com wasn’t even the only company pushing the idea. I’m sure many will also remember Beenz.com, which was basically the same thing. PayPal destroyed both of them, by, you know, actually letting people use cash money.

3. Kozmo.com

I can’t hate too much on this idea, but kozmo.com still lost so much money that it has to be on this list. Kozmo promised to deliver absolutely anything to your doorstep, from gum to groceries to DVD’s, but the margins just weren’t high enough to make the deal successful. They eventually expanded to seven cities, and had 1,100 employees at their peak. Kozmo ran through $280 million, but couldn’t ever make the idea work.

2. Webvan

Similar to Kozmo, Webvan wasn’t a bad idea, but it simply grew too huge too fast. Delivering groceries via an online order seems like it would be handy, but it’s tough to imagine many people (beyond the elderly and … shut ins?) using the service. Grocery stores operate on thin margins as it is, and when you add in massive infrastructure and labor costs you’re just not going to be successful. Plus I think many people actually like going to the grocery. I only go a couple of times a month, and I can’t say I really mind.

1. Digg.com

Digg was going to revolutionize the way news was presented to people, and pretty much singlehandedly created the niche of “social news”. They attracted a tech crowd who hated things like DRM, the RIAA, and the MPAA, and then completely and utterly sold out to the MPAA, removing submissions that contained an HD-DVD decryption code after the MPAA leaned on them. The sky was the limit for Digg, but no site can survive that pisses all over it’s most faithful users.