Five Of The Dumbest Websites From The Dot Com Bubble

Does it feel like we are living in a bubble right now?

With housing prices at a seemingly never-ending plateau and AI being around every corner you look, it's easy to think this is all going to come to a head in catastrophic fashion very 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, looked like the Hindenburg heading straight for a fireworks factory.

The Dot Com Bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s was a perfect storm of something becoming so big so quickly 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 spawned from the Dot Com Bubble, so I thought it would be fun to look back on five of the worst websites that era had to offer.

All five of these disasters directly led to the bursting of the bubble in 2001, so let's look back and laugh at how dumb everyone used to be while we simultaneously careen towards the edge of a cliff at breakneck speeds in the present.

5. Kozmo.com

Kozmo was a delivery service whose website was started up 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?

Well, for starters, there were no delivery fees, meaning Kozmo was operating at a massive loss pretty much from the start.

They also delivered mostly small items, like snack foods, so a simple bag of chips could be delivered virtually for free.

How did they plan on making money? Good question, but someone invested a ton of capital in these guys, and got nothing in return.

A great microcosm of the Dot Com Bubble.

4. Beenz.com

Basically, Beenz.com was a site where you accrued currency (called "beenz") purely for being on the internet.

A novel concept, but you could use these beenz to actually purchase items online. Almost like an internet trading system.

If that sounds like a glorified loyalty program, it's because it was, and there was no way to guarantee a profit.

It was poorly executed and had virtually no way of developing 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 things.

Hell, you could even use flooz to trade for beenz and then use those beenz to buy something online!

Are you confused yet?

Flooz was even backed 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 be infiltrated by Russian hackers.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

2. iSmell.com

A lot of these websites were dumb and failed not because the idea was a bad one, but because the execution was so poor, and they had no idea how to make money.

iSmell was not one of those websites. The idea behind it was really that dumb.

What it basically boiled down to was a piece of hardware that you attached to your computer that would let you smell things over the internet.

No, I'm not joking.

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 dumb enough to buy the attachment, they likely weren't going to use it to pay to smell things on the internet.

iSmell lasted all of one year before folding, and the idea was so stupid it was loosely spoofed on an episode of "Futurama."

1. Pets.com

This is the Dot Com Bubble's version of Fonzy jumping the shark.

Pets.com, much 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 hemhoraging money from day one.

The reason is twofold.

For starters, the shipping costs were so exorbitant, and they only charged for shipping on certain items, meaning it cost them more to ship than they made back in profits.

And secondly, any profits they did make were 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 if the company had no way of earning a profit.

Part of what made these companies so expensive were the marketing costs, and Pets.com with their stupid sock puppet were everywhere in the 90s.

Their commercials were everywhere, meaning they were paying a fortune for marketing, all while being deep in the red.

In hindsight, it's no wonder Pets.com failed. But we will always have those sock puppet commercials, which ironically outlived the actual website.