- Source: Dot-com commercials during Super Bowl XXXIV
Super Bowl XXXIV (played in January 2000) featured 14 advertisements from 14 different dot-com companies, each of which paid an average of $2.2 million per spot. In addition, five companies that were founded before the dot-com bubble also ran tech-related ads, and 2 before game ads, for a total of 21 different dot-com ads. These ads amounted to nearly 20 percent of the 61 spots available, and $44 million in advertising. In addition to ads which ran during the game, several companies also purchased pre-game ads, most of which are lesser known. All of the publicly held companies which advertised saw their stocks slump after the game as the dot-com bubble began to rapidly deflate.
The sheer amount of dot-com-related ads was so unusual that Super Bowl XXXIV has been widely referred to as the "Dot-Com Super Bowl", and it is often used as a high-water mark for the dot-com bubble. Of these companies, four are still active, five were bought by other companies, and the remaining five are defunct or of unknown status.
Effectiveness
Many websites saw short-term gains from the advertisements. LastMinuteTravel.com, for example, reported a surge of 300,000 hits per minute during its advertisement broadcast. In many cases, though, this did not translate into long-term gains. OurBeginning.com's revenue jumped 350% in Q1 of 2000, but its $5 million in advertising costs were still ten times what its customers spent. Short-term gains were not enough to recoup advertising losses, and Pets.com, Computer.com, and Epidemic.com, among many others, would fold before the end of the year.
Later references
Less than a year later, E*Trade ran an ad during Super Bowl XXXV mocking the glut of dot-com commercials during the previous game. The ad featured the chimpanzee from E*Trade's 2000 commercial wandering through a ghost town filled with the remains of fictional dot-com companies, including a direct reference to the already-defunct Pets.com's sock puppet. During the game that year, only three dot-com companies ran advertisements.
The dot-com commercials that aired during Super Bowl XXXIV received renewed attention in 2022 following Super Bowl LVI, which featured a large number of cryptocurrency-related ads. Critics drew comparisons between the rise of cryptocurrency and its commercials to the 2000 game's ads and the ensuing dot-com bubble burst, and nicknamed the 2022 game the "Crypto Bowl". Following a similar crash in cryptocurrencies, as well as major cryptocurrency exchange FTX filing for bankruptcy in November 2022, it and multiple other cryptocurrency-related companies that had bought ad space for the following Super Bowl (Super Bowl LVII) pulled out, resulting in no cryptocurrency-related ads airing that year.
In-game ads
The following list details each company, the commercials they ran, and their ultimate fate. All spots were 30 seconds long.
= Companies founded before the bubble
=In addition to the companies listed above, several tech companies that were founded before the dot-com boom also ran ads. As these are outside the strict definition of a dot-com company, since their founding significantly pre-dated the creation of a dot-com website, they have been listed separately.
Pre-game ads
The following list details companies which ran ads prior to the actual game time.
Notes
See also
Dot-com bubble
List of Super Bowl commercials § 2000 (XXXIV)
Cryptocurrency bubble
References
External links
= Contemporary opinions leading up to Super Bowl XXXIV
=CBS News article
CNN Money article
CNN Tech article Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine
= In-depth articles
=Analysis of OurBeginning.com and its advertising choices
Retrospective with founders of Computer.com