Does it feel like we’re living in a bubble right now?
With housing prices on a seemingly endless plateau and AI is around every corner you look, it’s easy to think it’s all going to come to a head in a cataclysmic way soon.
Having lived through so many of these so-called “bubbles”, younger generations have a hardened cynicism to spot these scams from a mile away, but that wasn’t always the case.
Before the AI craze or even the housing crisis of the late 2000s, there was a bubble that seemed too big to fail at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, the Hindenburg looked like it was headed straight for a fireworks factory.
The Dot Com bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s was a perfect storm of something getting so big so fast that investors were literally throwing money at any company or thing that had a website.
Some of the dumbest internet ideas of all time were born out of the Dot Com bubble, so I thought it would be fun to look back at five of the worst websites that era had to offer.
All five of these catastrophes led directly to the bursting of the bubble in 2001, so let’s look back and laugh at how stupid everyone used to be, while at the same time moving towards the edge of a cliff at breakneck speeds in the present.
5. Kozmo.com
Kozmo was a delivery service whose website was launched in 1998, and on the surface it wasn’t a terrible idea.
Hell, this predated things like Instacart and DoorDash by a good two decades, so why did it fail?
To begin with, there were no delivery fees, meaning that Kozmo pretty much ran at a massive loss from the start.
They also mostly delivered small things, like snacks, so a simple bag of chips could be delivered pretty much for free.
How were they going to make money? Good question, but someone invested a ton of capital into these guys and got nothing in return.
A fantastic microcosm of the Dot Com bubble.
4. Beenz.com
Basically, Beenz.com was a site where you earned currency (called “beenz”) just for being on the internet.
A new concept, but you can use these benz to actually buy items online. Almost like an internet trading system.
If it sounds like a glorified loyalty program, that’s because it was, and there was no way to guarantee a profit.
It was poorly executed and had virtually no opportunity to develop a real ecosystem, so the company collapsed almost as quickly as it started, but not before investors paid millions for the domain.
3. Flooz.com
Flooz was essentially Beenz, a site that used fake currency (can you guess what the currency was called) to buy real stuff.
Hell, you can even use flooz to trade for bez and then use those bez to buy something online!
Are you confused yet?
Flooz was even endorsed by Whoopi Goldberg of all people (I’m serious).
But the good times had to come to an end, and Flooz landed in hot water around the end of the Dot Com bubble for fraud and was later found to have been infiltrated by Russian hackers.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
2. iSmell.com
Many of these websites were stupid and failed, not because the idea was bad, but because the execution was so bad and they had no idea how to make money.
iSmell was not one of those sites. The idea behind it was really that stupid.
What it basically boiled down to was a piece of hardware that you plugged into your computer that would let you sniff things over the internet.
No, I’m not kidding.
The hardware alone probably put iSmell in the red, considering it was the 1990s and it probably wasn’t cheap to produce (plus no one bought it), but even when someone was stupid enough to buy the attachment, they probably wouldn’t use it to pay to smell things on the internet.
iSmell lasted a full year before folding, and the idea was so stupid that it was loosely spoofed in an episode of “Futurama.”
1. Pets.com
This is Dot Com Bubbles’ version of Fonzy jumping the shark.
Pets.com, like Kozmo, wasn’t a stupid idea on the surface—they sold pet supplies online—but the execution was so poor that the company was basically bleeding money from day one.
The reason is twofold.
To begin with, shipping costs were so exorbitant and they only charged for shipping certain items, meaning it cost them more to ship than they made back in profit.
And second, any profit they made was dumped into marketing.
The Dot Com bubble existed because investors saw a shiny new thing (the Internet) and dumped money into anything and everything online, even though the company had no way to make money.
Part of what made these companies so expensive was the marketing costs, and Pets.com with their silly sock puppet was everywhere in the 90s.
Their ads were everywhere, meaning they paid a fortune for marketing, all while being deep in the red.
In retrospect, it’s no wonder Pets.com failed. But we’ll always have those commercials for sock puppets, which ironically outlived the website itself.
