Dot-com bubble
historic speculative bubble covering roughly 1997–2000
The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that developed during the late 1990s and peaked on March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose by 600%, only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble. It is also known retrospectively as the tech–media–telecom (TMT) bubble, since it boosted established companies in those sectors as well as Internet startups.
During the dot-com crash, many online shopping companies like Pets.com, Webvan, and Boo.com, as well as several communication companies, such as WorldCom, NorthPoint Communications, and Global Crossing, failed and shut down; WorldCom was renamed to MCI Inc. in 2003 and was acquired by Verizon in 2006. Others, like Lastminute.com, MP3.com and PeopleSound were bought out. Larger companies like Amazon and Cisco Systems lost large portions of their market capitalization, with the latter losing 80% of its stock value.
Dot-com company
A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com, dot com, dotcom or .com), is a company that conducts most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website on the World Wide Web that uses the popular top-level domain (TLD) ".com". As of 2021, .com is by far the most used top-level domain, with almost half of all registrations.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Dot-com bubble” as historic speculative bubble covering roughly 1997–2000. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as historic speculative bubble covering roughly 1997–2000. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q79721. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1995, 2002 and 2003.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dot-com bubble” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.