The rise of the dead dotcom

There is an ongoing trend of resurrecting dead dotcoms – but will they regain a place in our online hearts? Greg Grimmer is not convinced; there is a reason why great brand owners like P&G and Unilever kill brands and relaunch new ones…

The owners of Boo, Bebo and Myspace walk into a media bar…is this some sort of joke?

And so it has come to pass that the Internet has reached such a glorious age where nostalgia is becoming the currency of choice.

It’s a bit like watching Stuart bloody Maconie on Channel 4 on a Sunday night blathering on about the 70s and space dust and Kate Thornton talking about her made up vinyl record collection.

PLEASE MAKE IT STOP – make it stop now. Before long we’ll be reminiscing about the Facebook newsfeed of 2009.

Or putting aside my desire for the new – and my cynicism for anything repackaged and re-purposed – is there something interesting going on here?

After watching this BEBO relaunch ad it would appear not.

However disastrous the amateur relaunch of the film, it is interesting that business leaders with potentially less money than Ad-sense (sic) think that now is the time to relaunch previously discarded, unloved and supposedly defunct web brands.

Is it that every decent domain name has been snapped up by budding dotcom entrepreneurs so that there is no option for us to start recycling the old websites of our youth?

Perhaps not; it may be that these wise old web heads have hit onto something. The hype (and let us not forget the ad budgets) of the wave one dotcoms was overzealous to say the least. So what? I hear you ask. Well of course it means that the land grab they made back in the day still has a place in our subconscious – a bit like when the aforementioned Kate Thornton reminds us of confectionery from a bygone age. Packet of Spangles anyone? I was fonder of a Texan bar myself.

“What a man has to chew”…well chew on this for a minute.

If we look further afield – and perhaps not quite in the dotcom graveyard yet, but certainly consigned to the digital knackers yard by many observers – we find Yahoo!, still alive and kicking.

The Wildman Bunch from Shaftesbury Avenue have been creating a stir in more recent times by making a Wimbledon school boy (Nick D’alonzo, founder of Summly) both a multi millionaire and an employee.

And even further afield – Marissa Mayer, the new CEO, spent $1.1 billion on Tumblr, with a promise to keep it cool. Perhaps more markedly she attracted even more headlines for insisting that the first generation Yahooers! – still working at Sunnyvale – turned up at work everyday.

Oh the dotcom shame! No remote working?

Fast forward five years and I think it may prove to be an inspired management decision.

Even more ancient than the BIG Y!, AOL – the Grand Daddy of the ISPs – has also trodden down a similar path, acquiring cooler brands (Huffington Post and Tech Crunch) and creating new ones (BE.On) – as well as still trading under its old moniker simultaneously. And it has to be said not without success; AOL stock was at one point this year the best performing tech stock in the US.

Google – whilst not totally impervious to the uncool digerati trend – has at least not fallen foul of the Grimmer half-life ten-year rule.

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to be headed down the acquisition route to avoid the obsoleteness faced by every other social network. A $1 billion IPO protection price for Instagram now looks like money well spent – and don’t bet against them increasing their failed offer of $3 billion this week for the latest teenage messaging phenomenon, Snapchat.

But let us return to our old friends, the dead dotcoms – those brands that weren’t caught before they fell off the proverbial Unique User Cliff. Will they regain a place in our online hearts and browser bookmarks?

I, for one, am not convinced; there’s a reason why great brand owners like P&G and Unilever kill brands and relaunch new ones. Many argue (including the HBR) they don’t do it often enough or fast enough, but all of the major brand owners would do it with brands – even those as unloved or sullied as the first generation dotcoms.

In the world of the web brand it would appear to be the appeal of the new – as demonstrated by the $3 billion valuation of Snapchat and the latest $35 million and £5 million valuations for Myspace and Friends Reunited, respectively.

As Facebook queries the value of the Poke button, the Oxford English dictionary made ‘Selfie’ its word of the year.

It would appear our love of the new remains undiminished.