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This Day in Tech: The Day the Bubble Burst

wired.com — March 10, 2000: The Nasdaq hits 5,048.62, the high-water mark of the dot-com boom. It's all downhill from here.

Who dugg this? Made popular Mar 11, 2007

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  • valis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+36By July, 2001, the company I had founded with two other partners dropped to 15% of its previous value. We were lucky to sell it before it dropped to 1%. In January, 2001, we were offered 10 Million for the IP. By July, that dropped to 1.5 Million. Naturally, we took the offer. Mind you, the company that bought us out disappeared a year later.
  • spokenrope, on 10/12/2007, -3/+34Also... March 10th is Chuck Norris's birthday. Coincidence?
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32My former money is 7 years old already? How time flies.
  • tom6a, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18What did (or didn't) the company do?
  • lovepoet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Are you trying to suggest that Chuck delivered a roundhouse kick to the market?

    Actually, it kinda makes sense.
  • Phantastica, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Here's a nice view from the peak:

    http://tinyurl.com/ynn74u
  • Bigcat1021, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12If you believe that any single president holds that much influence over the economy you should really go back to economics 101.

    NASDAQ rose and fell because of specuation, not because of economic policy.
  • Mofo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12If I only had a time machine and this article...
  • djackmanson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11I think not.
  • spudnic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Yes.
    If they didn't, they wouldn't still be taking VC money
  • interg12, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10that day sucked.
  • yllabianbitpipe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I remember going out for dinner and your waiter/waitress starts talking about the next .com IPO. One SF Chronicle article in particular talked about how people were offering landlords stock options in lieu of rent.
  • sixseven, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I would have pegged it as March 23 2000 when some court ruling came out
    and MSFT went to $111 which is about $48 adjusted.
    I said to myself that's crazy I should sell half my position.
    Did I? Nope.


  • platinumrod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The NASDAQ has gone up nice since March, 2003, however. In four years the market has gone up about 150 percent.
  • quanta88, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I think the legend has it that Joseph Kennedy (son of John F. Kennedy) had stopped to have his shoes shined on the way to the J.P. Morgans offices sometime in 1929. While having idle conversation during the shine, the shoeshine boy suggested he buy RCA stock because "they were hot".

    Kennedy continued to the offices whereupon he sold everything. Purportedly, he told his wife: "When the shoeshine boy starts giving you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market."
  • sanman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Heh, you wanna see the next bubble bursting?

    http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8NPJLD00.htm

    Wait until China starts butting heads with the US Congress as it tries to seriously start buying US companies and other assets, in order to make more effective use of its dollar reserves. That's when local opposition in the US will rally to rap China on the knuckles, causing it to step back from its US treasuries purchases. This in turn would precipitate a crisis with an immediate run on the dollar.

    If that happens, then the economy would implode, as the US govt is forced to sharply hike interest rates to remain solvent, causing the housing the bubble to burst explosively as vulnerable mortgage-holders get caught in between. You could call that a 'Great Reckoning' of sorts -- or the next 'Great Depression'.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6wtfunkymonkey...That is EXACTLY the point that the comment was trying to make. Do you realize how many idiots said the SAME thing in 2000? What else do we NEED but internet advertising revenue? Peopel were saying that right up to MArch 10, 2000. People thought that advertising revenue were going to allow them to retire at age 30. And then 2 eweeks later they were begging McDonalds to hire than as a janitor.

    IT WILL happen. It is not a question of if, it is when. And when it does, it could be MUCH worse. Tat is hte only thing Google has that makes money, and with more and more people using ad blockers, sooner or later, it is going to collapse again.
  • Just1nD, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8...goes the weasel
  • Four20, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5i dont think it would be wrong
  • argoff, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9We got nailed double hard because the dot.com bubble was actually two bubbles. One was a technology bubble, as people were trying to figure out how to monetize the information age, the other was a monetary bubble caused by the Federal Reserve banking system loaning so much money into the system that stocks blew thru the roof. The technology side eventually got redirected into things like Google and open source, the monetary side got re-directed into the housing market. Now the housing market is about to drop thru the floor while the technology is about ready to explode. The US is definitely birthing into the information age, and things that attempt to control information like fiat money manipulation and copyrights are going to get ripped to hell.

    One thing is for sure, all freaking hell is going to break loose. I predict that in 10 years the copyright system and Hollywood will be dead and open source p2p technology will be a raging economic fire. The US dollar will have collapsed as a currency, most financial institutions in the US will have collapsed, and 95% of houses will cost less than 6 months average pay. US society is about to go thru some shock therapy not seen since the civil war.
  • PunkFenixJT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I'm not 100% positive on all this, but this is what I believe to be current. Revision3 is doing decent I believe since ads on diggnation sell for $10,000/episode if i recall correctly. Furthermore, if Federated Media's numbers are current, ads are selling between $14-20 per 1000 views. And with 129,000,000 views/month, you can do the math from there. I'm sure bandwidth costs are huge for digg of course, but its not like the ads here are giving them nothing.
  • angusware, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4goes my hymen
  • astanhope, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5In 1997 I started BANGKOK.COM which was Thailand's first, only and biggest English-language web portal. A few friends invested a couple of thousand dollars each into the site and we quickly moved into making some decent money from advertising sales and user-generated content - nothing huge... a few thousand dollars a month extra in our pockets. I was on the Web 2.0 track in the early days - free homepages before Geocities... Free web based email a la HOTMAIL immediately after Hotmail hit the scene. Everything seemed groovy. A friend owned another popular Thai website which he sold for $2.1 million fairly early on - in Thailand, where $2.1 million is like $20 million. Anyway, that price became the benchmark for me to sell the site/domain and over the next couple of years I laughed off several offers in excess of $1 million because they weren't as much as my friend received for his site. Alas, then the bubble burst and suddenly those $1+ million offers were things of the past. I eventually sold the site/domain - it would be wrong for me to say for how much. Needless to say, I didn't get rich off the transaction.
  • MackPrime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4ouch
  • lovepoet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Wasn't the 1929 crash presaged by J.P.Morgans shoeshine boy offering him stock tips?

    I remember in 2000 just before this date a (tech) colleague saying: "you'd have to be a fool not to invest in the greatest bull market in history"
    and I mentioned the shoeshine boy anecdote, he scoffed, only to lose all of his investment by the end of march.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4In 2000 - there were hundreds of dot.coms, all with the same business plan- trade bogus advertising deals back and forth with each other to generate fake revenue so wall street could spin the profitability lie and most importantly, the insiders could cash out.

    Now, in 2007, the business for every web 2.0 company is the same. give away free content and put google adsense ads all over the site. that's it.

    the entire internet economy is now based on one company, google.

    and google's entire revenue is based on the shocking realization that if you make the advertising look exactly like a navigation link on a page, people are more likely to click it because they don't realize its an ad.

    they also realized that your grandmother has no idea that the first 3 results on any google search are paid results, just because the words "ads by goooooogle" are in tiny light gray type on the far right-hand side of the screen. google is in the business of tricking people, period. it's the entire business model.

    don't believe me? go over to a place like the webmasterworld.com forums and pick a topic at random to read. the guys spend 100% of every day trying to figure out ways to trick their users into clicking on ads. that's all the internet has become!

    i'm sure it'll work out well in the end. i mean, putting the entire internet economy in the hands of one company surely can't go wrong. (btw, google execs have sold 24 billion dollars worth of insider shares in the last three years, while Google the company has only earned 5 billion dollars in profit in TOTAL since the day it was founded. Google exists as a public company for one reason only: to let insiders sell stock to suckers.

    If Google had remained a private company and gave every penny of profit it ever made to its founders and employees, they would have only gotten 1/5th of what they've cashed out by selling stock. It's simple math- companies go public to rip off stupid people.
  • duck_oil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Getting technical here it's more like 17.4% compounded yearly.
  • wassim2k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I remember a news story on TV about .com singles. They met at a hip cafe and all they could talk about was B2C and B2B. I doubt anybody got laid.
  • wassim2k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I bougth a stock at $4.44; it's now worth $0.003 and Scottrade won't let me sell it because the trade cost would be higher than the returns.
  • redlemon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1what a terrible article.
  • loboforestal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Sell it to a friend for 2 cents.

    http://www.fool.com/taxes/2000/taxes000630.htm

    You can deduct the loss againt your gains and even against ordinary income (up to $3000 against income and you can carry anything over $3000 to future years).
  • rubah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@sanman

    It's interesting that you mention china. I was thinking the other day about how they're hosting the next Olympics. Now, I'm not well versed in history of the 20th century nor in foreign politics today, but weren't the 1936 (32?) Olympics held in Berlin?

    I thought of that the other day and it got me to wondering. It's probably nothing though, as I'm not prone to miraculous insight!

    Or maybe it's just obvious to everyone else.
  • loboforestal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Not quite. More like 90%

    NASDAQ composite mar 2007 = 2387
    NASDAQ composite mar 2003 = 1253

    Just guessing: but 1253*2 < 2387 and looks like about 90%

    Still ~23% a year ain't bad. Not bad at all. Try that all you "real estate never goes down" guys.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Bigcat...and yet many, MANY people actually blame it on Bush.
  • wthulhu, on 08/29/2009, -6/+4Do they really need anything else?
  • geekee, on 10/12/2007, -9/+4@BDog2g2

    I didn't make any comments regarding G.W. Bush. Work on your logic skills before commenting.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2The ***** George Bush!
  • Bdog2g2, on 10/12/2007, -13/+6@geekee,

    Yep that damned BJ he got is responsible for the bubble popping (not the only thing that went "pop"). Let me guess our "Savior" G.W. made it all betta for u?

    (for those with less of a sense of humor, I do no believe G.W. is a savior, he's a C student, with money, and a lot of DUMB luck). And....Bill C ruled!!!!
  • glamdr1ng, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3Pop!
  • CptCancer, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3yes
  • geekee, on 10/12/2007, -19/+6Note Clinton was still president on this day, for all those who admire his economic record. He presided over the biggest pyramid scheme in US history.
  • limbo1334, on 10/12/2007, -14/+0God save the queen.

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