Dot-Com Boom

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What Does Dot-Com Boom Mean?

The dot-com boom refers to the speculative investment bubble that formed around Internet companies between 1995 and 2000. The soaring prices of Internet start-ups encouraged investors to pour more money into any company with a “.com” or an “e-something” in its business plan. This excess capital encouraged Internet companies to form, often with very little planning, in order to get in on some of the easy money that was available at the time.

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The dot-com boom is also known as the dot-com bubble, Internet bubble, IT bubble or Internet boom.

Techopedia Explains Dot-Com Boom

The dot-com boom was followed by the dot-com crash, which saw many start-ups fail as investors cut off funding or the proposed businesses proved to be unprofitable. Not all the dot-com companies were failures, however, and some, like Amazon.com, would eventually surpass the prices they enjoyed during the boom. The dot-com boom was fueled by too much enthusiasm for the new opportunities presented by the World Wide Web. That said, many of the wild predictions about how different the world of commerce would be due to the Web have increasingly become a reality – just not at the pace many investors were expecting.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.