The dot com name drop

By Christina Okoli

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FORGET�about sticks, stones and silly nursery rhymes; in the dot com world, a name can certainly hurt you.

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Online businesses are scrambling to change their image, and ruthlessly chopping the dot com suffix off their names, in an effort to distance themselves from the IT crisis.

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As more and more dot com businesses go belly-up, the mere mention of the words dubya, dubya, dubya before a company's name is enough to send investors heading for the hills. Therefore, the online community is responding, not by reworking failed business plans, but, more simply, by changing�its names.

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The most recent company to do just this is the IT and media investment group VoyagerIT.com. With the two dreaded terms IT and dot com in its name, the company had problems wowing investors, and earlier this year it changed its name to Cater Barnard ' as remote a dot com name as it could find!

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Findstar.com, has also shrugged off its dot com tag, though it continues to do its business online. Gameplay.com then followed the trend, and has now renamed itself Gameplay, without changing any aspect of its business practice.

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Industry analysts predict that most online businesses will follow suite, and drop Internet prefixes, in order to avoid association with the shakeout in the IT industry.

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In tandem with this shift, sales and costs of dot com domain names have also plummeted in recent months, as the market for Internet addresses continues to fall. It was only last year when a company bought the domain address Business.com for $7.5 million from an Internet entrepreneur. And although this price is the highest recorded for an Internet domain name, many of the cleverest dot com names were once going for up to $4 million.

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However, as the Internet golden age draws to an end, domain name auction sites, such as eBay, are increasingly looking like the wastelands of the web. Individuals and businesses are no longer clambering for snazzy dot com names, and the tide is, in fact, reversing, as more and more defunct dot coms try to resell their site names to someone else.

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Most recently, Furniture.com, Pets.com, Mortgage.com, Living.com and Garden.com, were all posted for re-auction as the businesses pulled out. But analysts are sceptical that the sellers will recoup even a tenth of what they initially paid for the site names. Buyers will be forgiven for their reluctance to pay more than a few hundred dollars for a failed dot com name.

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Scott Kraft, a partner with the marketing consultancy Sterling Group, said, 'No matter how catchy or simple or all-inclusive their names are, a mere dot com address is not worth much without brand support.

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'People thought they were buying incredibly valuable real estate on the web with those one-word, generic names, but they forgot about the need to build real brands first.'

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Yet, as if to add insult to injury, last December, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it was to introduce seven new Internet suffixes, including dot info, dot biz, dot name and dot museum. The result of this will be an increase in the availability of Internet addresses; which will inevitably push down the cost and demand for dot coms even further.