Super Bowl Lures HomeAway, 10 Years After Dot-Com Debacle
They called it the Dot-Com Super Bowl.
For one brief cultural moment, little-known start-ups, often based on business plans flimsier than a Brett Favre retirement announcement but inexplicably flush with venture capital, occupied the most valuable advertising space in the history of the world. Super Bowl XXXIV, pitting the Tennessee Titans against the St. Louis Rams on January 31, 2000, was going to be their moment to break through to consumers and vault to the heights of the new e-commerce economy.
With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight, of course, it represents the moment when these companies had reached their frothy pinnacle. Most of the more than a dozen dot-coms that paid more than $2 million for 30-second Super Bowl ads–such as Computer.com, Epidemic.com and OurBeginning.com–failed to catch on, and Pets.com became the Poster Sock-Puppet of empty Silicon Valley hype.
